Eve Garrard on how not to explain suicide bombing

I’m probably the million^th blogger to recommend taking a look at Eve Garrard’s post on Norm Geras’s blog on how not to explain suicide bombing. Here’s her peroration:

Explanations of suicide bombing in terms of poverty or despair, or the lack of any other way of achieving political goals, seem to be empirically false – many, maybe most, suicide bombers are neither appallingly poor nor desperate nor unable to access other forms of political progress. But, so I’ve argued, even if none of that were true, poverty and despair would still be weak and unsatisfactory explanations and excuses for this particularly horrible form of murder.

May I offer a few poorly-informed conjectures of my own? First, I wonder if a culture in which the value of the individual is not exalted may not be a factor. When the individual is subordinated to the family, clan, tribe, or ethnicity that would certainly seem to make suicide more acceptable. When you add to that a conviction of the superiority of own’s own family, clan, tribe, or ethnicity over the objects of an attack (a common human trait) that might tend to support the idea of a suicide attack. Another factor that could play a role might be a touch of millenialism. Or what’s been referred to as a “feeling of futility”: the absence of a tradition that problems can, in fact, be solved.

Self-sacrifice is not completely unknown in the West. When one of our soldiers throws himself on a grenade to save his buddies, he’s lauded. Is this how the suicide attackers view themselves? They’re taking one to save their friends and family?