Essay on Suicide Terror

Writing 2 Spring 2009 Tim Fitzmaurice Essay on Suicide Terrorism: Logical or Irrational? Due Monday May 11th Four or five pages with citations from the film, the novel and the Pape book—at least one reference to each.

Write a four- to five-page essay on the causes of suicide terrorism and the possible responses to it, according to what we have read. I want your opinion to guide the discussion, but I expect to see five or more quotes from the novel, The Attack, the non-fiction book, Dying to Win, and the film, “Paradise Now.”
Shaul Shay in The Shahids (Transaction Publishers, 2004), a book we did not read, says that

despite several “rays of light” in the dark terrain of suicide attacks … it would appear that in the foreseeable future suicide attacks will continue to constitute the central threat posed by radical Islam against its adversaries in the Muslim world, the West, and at any other confrontation points of Islam against other cultures …. The combination of suicide attacks along with non-conventional means … may become the gravest threat to public security throughout the free world. (221)

Some of Shay’s assertions, in his book, are in stark disagreement with Pape’s notion, in Dying To Win. Similarly, in an interview the director of a new film, “Suicide Killers,” makes a similar point that suicide bombing is an attack by a fringe element of Islamic fundamentalists against anything that contradicts their world view—not merely occupation, and the majority of their own community does not support them, and that the only strategy is a harsh response against that minority of “Nazis.” Pape says that suicide attack is not about Islam and is not going to be directed willy-nilly at any other point of confrontation, but in fact is restricted to arenas where occupation is central. What do you think is the case? What is the motive for these attacks, the strategic, the social, and the individual motives that drive people to these murderous extremes and how should we address the problem? Are the attackers supported by the community? Are they focused on democratic states like Pape says and at war against occupying forces or are they just madmen and women, driven by distorted religious ideas, who hate certain people, ideas and states that they disagree with?
Please use quotes from the film, the novel, and the book to make your argument, to show the problem, the people involved, and the ways that it fits into the communities where it occurs and why it seems to happen. Then talk about solutions to it. You cannot start this essay with a story from your personal history or observations, unless you have been involved somehow, but you can use the readings or the film for an example to kick off the essay—a great source for this I think. Just narrate a piece from the film or novel and then start theorizing.
Remember that a thesis says something like “We as a community need to understand this thing for what it is and to take the right action to respond to it in some productive way. If we don’t we can expect some very real consequences.” So if you can fill in the blanks about what the idea is that we need to understand and how we need to understand it, then you can begin to write this essay from your perspective.