the technologist

Here’s a formula familiar to any news consumer in the West: suicide bomber plus dead and injured people plus the Middle East equals crazy religious fanaticism. So familiar is this formula that we don’t even think about it as something formulated but as merely observed reality. It appears with. numbing. regularity. Look at any batch of wire stories any week of the year and there it is.

Most of us can manage barely more than a disapproving sigh. Any new-information burn or shock that once came from reading about such things faded long ago. A man or woman or child can walk into a crowded public space, blow themselves up, take sixty souls with them to paradise and hardly register a blip anymore. Such is life amid a drawn out worldwide conflict, sometimes far away, sometimes nearby, the new white noise of our lives.

It’s way past time to turn the old newsroom adage “if it bleeds, it leads” on its head: “if it bleeds, it misleads.” We have to shakeup the mainstream stereotype of the suicide bomber and free ourselves of its knee-jerk association with fanatical religious faith. Safe to say that once the image of the Muslim suicide bomber saturated American cinema as the preferred bad guy motif that it was beyond caricature and therefore absolutely no use as news information. As the Dude Lebowski would put it: “Our thinking has been uptight, man… I mean, new shit has come to light.”

Consider a recent article in The Economist that uses opinions from several U.S. based experts to undermine the idea that religious affiliation is a dominant factor in suicide attacks:

Robert Pape, of the University of Chicago, has identified three factors that make suicide terrorism probable. It is likely to occur when a community feels it is under occupation that must be resisted; when the “occupier” is a democratic society whose opinion can be swayed; and where there is a sectarian difference between the perpetrators’ community and the target community. In his view, religious differences help to make suicide attacks conceivable, but they are not the main driver. Nichole Argo, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agrees that religion’s role is limited. What counts is a background of support for the idea of insurgency: a sense among self-annihilators that their peers will see them as heroes. Nor is religious indoctrination a big factor, Ms Argo insists; only a fraction of the alumni of hard-line madrassas in Pakistan and Indonesia engage in violence.

Reuters yesterday debunked earlier dramatic claims that two women with Down Syndrome were used as bombers in suicide attacks last week in Iraq. Fact is, when the Down Syndrome report was first published as news, the notion did not surprise anyone. The easy acceptance that Islam in particular somehow especially facilitates the kind of madness that would make people strap a bomb to someone with Down Syndrome— that’s a story that requires additional serious reporting and analysis in the mainstream media.

As it stands, religious fanaticism is a much too convenient a scapegoat and too easily digestible as the go-to thinking behind such incomprehensible abomination. We need to dig deeper.

Stumble it!

~ by Kent Francisco on February 23, 2008.