2
peoples is not only quite common in liberal democratic countries; it is necessary to a
hierarchical global order. It is quite true that the death of poor people in the world does not
matter as much as the death of people in affluent societies. In saying this and acting on this
belief, the patterns of living and dying in the world come to be affected by it.”3
Asad è stupito dall‟ingegnosità con cui molti politici, noti intellettuali e giornalisti forniscono
giustificazioni morali all‟uccisione e degradazione di altri esseri umani. Quello che sembra
contare non è l‟uccisione e la disumanizzazione in quanto tali ma come si uccide, e per quale
motivazione.
Ovviamente le genti di tutte le epoche storiche hanno giustificato i massacri dei cosiddetti
nemici e di altri che non venivano considerati degni di vivere; la sola differenza è che i liberali
di oggi che sposano tali giustificazioni pensano di essere diversi perché moralmente evoluti. Da
questo stesso pensiero discendono implicazioni sociali, ed è quindi un simile modo di pensare
che fa la vera differenza. Il pensiero liberale parte dall‟assunto che ognuno ha il diritto di
perorare la propria causa nella piena consapevolezza che l‟idea di autodifesa è soggetta a
notevoli interpretazioni, cosicché, ad esempio, la liberazione dall‟oppressore in Iraq diviene
parte integrante della giustificazione sia per gli americani che per gli insorti. Molti liberali
credono che le persone abbiano l‟obbligo morale di aggredire ed estirpare il male, sia allo scopo
di redimere se stessi che di redimere coloro che non sono in grado di farlo direttamente con
propri mezzi. Il concetto di male non viene concepito come principio naturalmente connaturato
al mondo – come avviene negli insegnamenti manichei e zoroastriani – bensì come un principio
dinamico che avversa il volere divino e che per questo va eliminato. Di conseguenza è la
resistenza a tale volontà che definisce il male, e tutti gli uomini virtuosi sono spinti a vincerlo a
qualsiasi costo (così, stando alla fede cristiana, Cristo ha trionfato sul male, e Dio si è
riconciliato col mondo per mezzo della Crocifissione). Combattere il male è una giustificazione
antica che trova spesso ai nostri giorni delle nuove formulazioni. Il mondo di oggi non è, come
molti sostengono, semplice espressione del dispiegarsi della cristianità, e fra la modernità
secolarizzata e il suo passato coesistono senza dubbio continuità ma anche fondamentali cesure.
…..
CHAPTER III
HORROR AT SUICIDE TERRORISM
IN THIS FINAL CHAPTER, I want to move away from the preoccupation with the meaning of
suicide bombing and with the question of what motivates the bombers to kill innocent civilians by
dying – of why people choose death rather than life. I want to reframe the question. I want to ask:
Why do people in the West react to verbal and visual representations of suicide bombing with
professions of horror? Unimaginable cruelties perpetrated in secret or openly, by dictatorships and
democracies, criminals and prison systems, racially oriented immigration policies and ethnic
cleansing, torture and imperial wars are all evident in the world today. What leads liberal moralists
to react to suicide bombings with such horror? Why are there so many articles, books, TV
documentaries, and films on the topic?4 Why are people – myself included – so fascinated and
3
Talal Asad, op. cit., pp. 94-95.
4
The number of books devoted to this subject is already very considerable, and they deal with a familiar range of
explanations – essentially those I have disscussed in my second chapter. Here are just a few that I have read in addition
to those mentioned in previous chapters: Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers – Who They Were, Why
They Did It (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs
Square:A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ami Pedahzur,
3
disturbed by it? In what follows, I offer a tentative answer by looking at some modern conceptions
of killing and dying that have emerged out of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
In a review of two books on Palestinian suicide bombers, the British psychoanalyst Jacqueline
Rose notes that suicide operations do not kill as many civilians as conventional warfare does, and
yet people react to them with exceptional horror. “The horror”, she writes, “would appear to be
associated with the fact that the attacker also dies. Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only
less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western leaders at least, to be morally superior. Why
dying with your victim should be seen as a greater sin than saving yourself is unclear. Perhaps, then,
the revulsion stems partly from the unbearable intimacy shared in their final moments by the suicide
bomber and her or his victims. Suicide bombing is an act of passionate identification – you take the
enemy with you in a deadly embrace.”5
Rose is right to contrast reactions to the massive killing of civilians in World War II – the
saturation bombing of Japanese and Germany cities – with Western reactions to suicide bombers.
(How does one compare the suffering of those who survive in the two cases?) Her question about
horror is important, but she doesn‟t quite answer it. “The horror would appear to be associated with
the fact that the attacker dies,” she observes acutely but then moves – too quickly – from the
reaction of horror on the part of those who confront it as an image to a puzzlement about the
perpetrator‟s moral status (“Why dying with your victim should be seen as a greater sin than saving
yourself is unclear.”) The latter shifts our attention again to the question of what motivates the
suicide bomber to take his own life. Although Rose is a sophisticated commentator, her account
leads the reader to lose sight of the matter of the observer‟s sense of horror.
So: Why the horror? Is it because death and dismemberment happen suddenly in the midst of
ordinary life? Aerial bombing does give at least some warning (sirens, searchlights, the drone of
airplanes, the distant explosions), however ineffective the immediate possibilities of shelter may be.
(Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the other hand, were atom-bombed without any warning and with no
opportunity for civilian escape.) There is no warning – so it is often said – when the suicide bomber
strikes her victims out of the routine of everyday living. There is something to this, but as an
explanation it seems to me inadequate to account for the more muted reactions to the continuing
death or maiming of adults and children by land mines in the third world. True, for the Western
media, the sudden death of Europeans is more shocking than that of non-Europeans, and there are
historical reasons for focusing on non-European militants who kill Europeans. Western reports of
Tamil suicide bombers in Sri Lanka and even of the many suicide bombers in occupied Iraq
attacking fellow Iraqis do not display the same horror – or evoke it in a Western audience. All of
this may be true, but it still doesn‟t tell us why horror is expressed, when it is genuinely expressed,
and what it consists in.
There is certainly something distinctive about a suicide attack, and part of it is this: The bomber
appears as it were in disguise; he appears anonymously, like any member of the public going about
his normal business. An object of great danger, he is unrecognized until it is too late. Signs taken
innocently are other than they appear. There is also something else, however, something that Rose
identifies but does not go on to address: “The horror would appear to be associated with the fact that
the attacker dies.” Why is that significant? Every death of human beings that is witnessed, every
Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge: Polity, 2005); Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005); Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: Allah’s New Martyrs (London: Pluto,
2002); Raphel Israeli, Islamekaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology (London: Cass, 2003); Lauri S. Friedman,
What Motivates Suicide Bombers? (Detroit: Greenhaven, 2005); Christoph Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern
History of Suicide Bombing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Joyce Davis, Martyrs: Innocence,
Vengeance, and Despair in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Rosemarie Skaine, Female
Suicide Bombers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006). In this literature, suicide bombers are a recognizable type. Even the
distinguished author John Updike has moved into this territory with his latest novel Terrorist (New York: Knopf, 2005)
– a tale set in urban America, complete with fanatical Arab sheikhs and more human American converts to Islam.
5
Jacqueline Rose, “Deadly Embrace”, London Review of Books 26, no. 21 (November 4, 2004).
4
sudden death of someone spatially or socially near, may evoke violent emotions: anguish, fear, rage.
What is special about suicide?
In the Abrahamic religions, suicide is intimately connected with sin because God denies the
individual the right to terminate his own earthly identity. In the matter of his/her life, the individual
creature has no sovereignty. Suicide is a sin because it is a unique act of freedom, a right that
neither the religious authorities nor the nation-state allows. Today, the law requires that a prisoner
condemned to death be prevented from committing suicide to escape execution; it is not death but
authorized death that is called for. So, too, all other convicts in prison, all soldiers in battle, and the
terminally ill cannot kill themselves, however good they think their reasons for doing so may be.
The power over life and death can be held legitimately only by the one God, creator and destroyer,
and so by his earthly delegates. But although individuals have no right to kill themselves, God (and
the state) gives them the right to be punished and to atone.6
In antiquity, by contrast, suicide was neither a sin nor a crime, although it was typically the elites,
to whom that freedom was a personal entitlement, who could legitimately take their own lives.
Political authorities could offer suicide to members of the elite as a legal option to being judicially
executed (Socrates is perhaps the most famous example). Nietzsche insisted that this suicide not
only foreshadowed the Crucifixion but was also, like the latter, despicable because both were
“undefiant deaths” (though there is an important difference here to which I‟ll return: Socrates‟ death
was a private suicide, carried out in the small company of friends; 7 the Crucifixion a public
demonstration of punishment and redemption). Nevertheless, it is not the fact that the subject has
chosen suicide that critics like Nietzsche object to but its manner and meaning. They are asserting
the secular humanist principle that fighting against the demands of external power is a sign of
nobility. There is nothing horrible, so they seem to say, in violent death itself, only in the motive
that defines it.8
But first: What is horror? Horror is not a motive but a state of being. Unlike terror, outrage, or the
spontaneous desire for vengeance, horror has no object. It is intransitive. I find Stanley Cavell
helpful here.
“Horror”, he writes, “is the title I am giving to the perception of the precariousness of human
identity, to the perception that it may be lost or invaded, that we may be, or may become, something
other than we are, or take ourselves for; that our origins as human beings need accounting for, and
are unaccountable.”9 Horror, Cavell observes, is quite different from fear; it is not the extreme form
6
The majority of Muslims have tended to regard even the deliberate seeking of martyrdom (talab al-shahada) as
prohibited. See, for example, Abu Hamid Muhammad bin Muhammad al-Ghazali, Ihya’ulumaddin, 5 vols. (Beirut: Dar
al Kutub al-„Ilmiya, 2001), 2:285-86, the most famous work of perhaps the most influential medieval Muslim
theologian in history. Today, this position is also that of the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Both their eighteenth-century
founder, Muhammad bin Abdul-Wahhab (see Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, Mu’allafat al-shaykh al-imam
Muhammad bin ‘abdalwahhab, vol. 2, al-Fiqh [Riyadh: Islamic University, n.d.], pp.3 ff.), and the leading Saudi
theologians today have condemned suicide of any kind as sinful. In an interview several months before the attack on the
World Trade Center but after the first suicide bombings in Israel, the Saudi grand mufti, Shaykh Abd al-Aziz bin
Abdallah Al al-Shaykh, declared all terrorism (tarwi’) legally forbidden (see “Mufti ‘amm al-sa’udiyya li-l-sharq al-
awsat: Khatf al-ta’irat wa tarwi’ al-aminin muharram shar’an,” in the daily al-Sharq al-awsat, April 21, 2001).
According to the shaykh, while jihad was enjoined in Islam, suicide (intihar) could under no circumstances be regarded
as permitted. Other muftis, such as the Egyptian Yusuf al-Qaradawi, have taken a contrary view in the case of
Palestinian suicide bombings.
7
Not all judicial self-executions were private: the ceremonial suicide known as hara-hiri (seppuku) in nineteenth-
century Japan was conducted in the presence of a large assembly. See the first European description of one such suicide
in Tales of Old Japan, by Lord Redesdale (A.B. Freeman-Mitford), published in London by Macmillan in 1910.
8
According to al-Sha‟rawi, one of the most influential preachers in the Arabic-speaking world, suicide is to be classed
together with madness and is (tautologically) a sign of loss of faith in God. That is why, he says, it is more common in
the unbelieving West. (See Muhammad Mutawally al-Sha‟rawi, Al-fatawa al-kubra [Beirut: al-Maktaba al-„asriyya,
2005], pp. 97, 103-4). Thus whereas in antiquity suicide could be an honorable completion to life, here it is a sign of
supreme irrationality. This view is, of course, found in all the Abrahamic religions, but the idea of suicide as an act of
supreme unreason is also very strong in secular law and morality.
9
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 418-19.
5
of fear that we call “terror”. If fearlessness is a possible alternative to terror, there is no parallel
alternative to horror. I want to stress that in this sense horror applies not only to the perception that
our own identities are precarious but also those of other humans – and not only the identity of
individual humans but also that of human ways of life. As understood here, horror is not essentially
a genre – the horror film or novel – that articulates a plot: sudden discovery of evil, fear of disaster.
Horror is a state of being that is felt. Horror explodes the imaginary, the space within which the
flexible persona demonstrates to itself its identity.
Let me concretize the idea of horror by reference to published accounts of suicide operations. The
accounts typically refer to the sudden shattering and mingling of physical objects and human
bodies.
Here is a long description of such an event in Jerusalem:
With my back turned to the door as I sat at the counter of a pizza parlor waiting for my order, I didn‟t
see a man try to enter with a backpack slung over his shoulder. The pack contained a bomb. When a
suspicious guard turned him away, the man ran to the door of the coffeehouse 20 feet away and blew
himself up as two guards rushed him, shouting, “Duck, everybody!” I saw a flash out of the corner of
my eye and an instant later heard the crack of an explosion. I knew instantly a suicide bomber had
struck. “Damn, they‟ve hit Jerusalem,” I thought as I ran toward the door. The eerie silence in the
immediate aftermath was broken first by the sound of a woman‟s whimper blossoming into a full-
blown scream. As I hit the five or six steps down to the street, a woman in shock swept past me with
her arm extended, looking at her bloody hand as though it were a foreign object. The first thing I saw
was the severed, bloody head of the suicide bomber, sitting upright in the middle of the street like a
Halloween fright mask. The sight was confirmation of an ugly truth I had learned from Israeli police
spokesman Gil Kleiman at the day‟s first bombing. “The weakest part of your body is your neck,”
Kleiman told me after a worker had climbed a 20-foot ladder to retrieve the bomber‟s head, which the
blast had torn from his body. The acrid smell of dynamite and burned hair was in the air. In the
coffeehouse, the walls were charred and the floor was littered with shattered furniture. There was no
movement.
A fluorescent light glowed behind the counter. “Stop looking around. Do something. Help,” I told
myself. Two feet away on the asphalt was a woman, her skin ghostly pale. Later, from newspaper
photos, I learned the woman‟s name was Nava Applebaum. Her father was the emergency room
director of a hospital and a specialist in treating suicide bombing victims. He had met Nava there to
have a father-daughter talk on the eve of her wedding. For her wedding, the 50-year-old Cleveland-
born doctor had prepared a book with sayings from family members and himself, biblical passages and
marital advice. Twisted bodies.
Applebaum, 20, was curled on her side gasping for breath, her father‟s body eight feet away, his back
and head smoldering. I wasn‟t sure what the force of the blast had done to her internal organs, but
either the concussion of the blast or her collision with the pavement had twisted her left arm at the
shoulder and elbow in a direction a limb is not intended to go. The heat of the blast had singed her hair
gray. I huddled next to her and pressed my fingers against two dime-sized holes that shrapnel had torn
in her neck…..As ambulances arrived and Israeli police and rescue workers responded, I yelled to
catch their attention. One worker, then two, joined me. One felt for a pulse. His shoulders sagged.
Nava was dead, along with six others. They placed her body on a gurney and rushed it away.10
The account I have just quoted reflects feelings of anger, distress, and compassion. But one gets a
glimpse of something else, too, a sense of something distinct from sympathy for the suffering of
victims and survivors or from outrage at the destruction of human life: the woman‟s bloody hand is
described as an alien thing; the bomber‟s head in the street as a fright mask; a man‟s back and head
burn like coal; his daughter‟s arm is not a natural limb. One is presented here not just with a scene
10
News story by Craig Nelson in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 14, 2003, p. 5A.
6
of death and wounding but with a confounding of the body‟s shapes. It is as though the familiar,
reassuring face of a friend had disintegrated before one‟s eyes. All this is interwoven with touching
details (names and personal histories of some of the victims) based on information that could only
have been acquired long after the event described so dramatically – by which I don‟t mean to imply
that it is untrue but that it is a construction. The narrative is intended as a way of making readers
feel the horror of a suicide bombing, to feel helpless in the face of a sudden attack against everyday
life and, above all, the loss of that ordinariness in which human identity resides. There are two
crucial things here: the writer‟s visceral sense of horror (which might have been felt witnessing a
terrible accident) and his reconstruction of it specifically as the work of a suicide bomber.
In fact, horror is more often encountered in recitations of war, most acutely in retrospect by those
who have experienced it. Theodore Nadelson, a psychiatrist who treated Vietnam veterans suffering
from post-traumatic stress disorder, has written about their experiences of war, its terrors and
enchantments. He has also written briefly (too briefly) of the aesthetics and pornography of
killing,11 the sense that many soldiers in war have of affirming life through the very destruction of
other human beings (regardless of whether they are non-combatants), their erotic involvement with
death (including their own), and the intoxication with killing that Marines call “eye-fucking.”12 I
reproduce at length one of the many accounts given to him by anguished patients:
I got a photograph. I‟m holding two heads – standing there holding two heads by their hair. Can you
believe it? Well, there were other guys walking around with heads on poles – like savages, like long
ago… and nothing un-normal about it, that‟s the un-normal part – it was normal, real, it was
accepted. They took a picture of me. That‟s how I remember it because of the photo. That‟s why I
still have it – reminds me of those times – without the picture I won‟t believe it in peacetime…. In
„Nam you always got something to do, ambush, clean out a VC [Vietcong] tunnel…you do it so you
can get out, get food, get water, and maybe, but you don‟t want to think of it, you [will] get back
home, back to the “real world.” But now you are in hell and you act it. You don‟t dare think of
home, no way. If you try to get home, you worry about trying to save yourself, you get dead. So
nothing matters. The VC I killed…. Jesus! Well, you had to do it. You had to do it to get out of
there. I didn‟t care about the VC – they would have killed me. But the women and kids? First I was
picking them [children] up after the gunships shot up a ville. Then I capped them too. They‟d grow
up to kill you – maybe that was the story. But that‟s crazy – but like I said crazy was normal there.
Unless you accepted that as normal, you could not live through it. They would do things, then it‟s
over, and you go on. Hell, they [the VC] would do it to you, you have to do it to them a hundred
times harder and worse…. So these guys found these women in a village and they started to rape
them. Yeh, and they are banging away and then they take out their K-bars, for God‟s sake! And they
are stabbing them, crazy, out of control, and banging away – crazy – and still doing it when the
women are dead. You understand? Maybe you understand…but it isn‟t possible to get people to
understand who were not there. It was terrible what I – we did – but we all did it, those good guys I
knew. All good, do anything for you. I can say it, I loved them….But the worst thing I can say about
myself is that while I was there I was so alive. I loved it the way you can like an adrenaline high, the
way you can love your friends, your tight buddies. So unreal and the realest thing that ever
11
Nadelson cites the passage from the Iliad in which Patroclus kills a Trojan with his spear, like catching a fish:
There is joy and celebration of the killer‟s own life, skilfully taking a life. He is the hunter or, in the simile, the
fisherman, the superior of the slain, the quick not the dead. He is the manifest lord raised high by the dead body he has
created. The victim is face down, neutered, dirtied, and diminished. The killer has manifested the most naked self-
assertion. He is lasciviousness personified. He is adulated as a hero, his potency glorified; he shines. The elegance of
killing action in war is celebrated throughout the Greek tragedies; it is echoed in the Hebrew Bible…and in literature on
war through history. (Theodore Nadelson, Trained to Kill: Soldiers at War [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2005], p. 64)
12
Ibid., pp. 68-69.
7
happened. Un-fucking-imaginable. And maybe the worst thing for me now is living in peacetime
without a possibility of that high again.
I hate what the high was about, but I loved the high.13
13
Ibid.
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