Given that “by definition, suicidal terrorists are suicidal,” Lankford's book The Myth of Martyrdom (Lankford Reference Lankford2013c) reaches its conclusion before starting. Absent evidence of clinical morbidity or past suicide attempts, Lankford uses indicators such as “fleeting suicidal thoughts,” “risky life style,” and “suicide-like gestures,” which may subsume tens if not hundreds of millions of people. He claims to overthrow “the conventional wisdom” that suicide terrorists were “ordinary individuals before they were recruited and indoctrinated” (p. 4) through “brainwashing” (p. 12). But “brainwashing” hardly figures among experts cited. Rather, suicide terrorists are often portrayed as self-seekers propelled by: moral outrage against foreign occupation or perceived attacks on the Muslim community, a search for personal significance and glory in a sacred cause, and the group dynamics of peer influence and popular support. (On brainwashing as popular fiction, see Atran Reference Atran2010c; Sageman Reference Sageman2008).
Lankford charges that: “scholars and government experts continue to spread this terrorist propaganda” of self-sacrifice (p. 49), albeit unwittingly, because older academics unimaginative conformists “too scared of being wrong,” and so adopt a “less risky perspective” (pp. 3–4).
Consider: For Lankford, social scientists conduct surveys and interviews “because it gives them new, exclusive” data, ignoring “social or cultural biases” or that respondents “may be lying, with ulterior motives” (p. 21). Relevant social science, however, assumes mistrust of direct informant responses as revealing objective fact or truth (Atran & Medin Reference Atran and Medin2008). More so regarding terrorists: If I naively believed what jihadis told me, I'd be dead. And by what imagination does fieldwork with terrorists, including escaping from killers in Sulawesi's jungles or in a Lashkar-e-Taiba mosque in Kashmir, qualify as more risk-aversive than Lankford surveying others' data?
In full disclosure, I'm repeatedly pilloried for a passage in a Science article written over a decade ago: “no instances of religious or political suicide terrorism stem from lone actions of cowering or unstable bombers” (Atran Reference Atran2003, p. 1536). Then, there were no documented cases of lone-wolf psychopathology among the anarchist bombers, Japanese kamikaze, and jihadis described. Later, based on my field studies and collaborations across Eurasia and North Africa, I noted in publications and congressional testimony that suicide attacker profiles began changing markedly after 9/11: from mostly married, middle class, fairly well-educated men in their 20s and 30s recruited out of country, to mostly unmarried, marginal, less-educated young men in their teens and early 20s enlisting in-country and abroad. Self-seekers engaged in small, mutually supportive clusters of friends and fellow travelers, with little religious education but “born again” into radical Islam to find personal significance through a glorious cause, these were mostly young adults in transitional stages in life: students, immigrants, between jobs or girlfriends, away from family and seeking a new home (Atran Reference Atran2008; Reference Atran2011; Sageman Reference Sageman2008).
Groups differed. In Palestine, Hamas martyrdom volunteers were above the mean in education and socio-economic status, whereas Fatah's al-Aqsa' Martyrs Brigades were recruiting anyone they could (including children, wayward women, petty criminals) to compete with Hamas (70–80% of Palestinians consistently supported suicide attacks during the Second Intifada, with “joy” the most frequent accompanying emotion; Ginges et al. Reference Ginges, Atran, Medin and Shikaki2007). In Indonesia, Jemaah Islamiyah factions retained top religious and scientific echelons of select madrassas to plan operations (Magouirk & Atran Reference Magouirk and Atran2008), but sought “lost” youth outside madrassas to detonate and die. In Iraq, Zarqawi's al-Qaeda affiliate rushed young volunteers from Saudi Arabia and Yemen into suicide actions, but kept Algerian volunteers and others with previous fighting experience for sustained combat operations (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2007). In Afghanistan and Pakistan, Taliban funneled schoolboys from poor rural madrassas into suicide missions, whereas groups with international ambitions, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, engaged people with skill in languages and cultures, computers, and GPS, for attacks in India and elsewhere (Atran Reference Atran2010c).
Lankford ignores such group differences, presenting his own opportunity sample of 136 individuals as representative, including non-suicides such as Anders Breivik (a white supremacist imprisoned for killing Norwegian youth), Jim Adkisson (an anti-liberal imprisoned for attacking a Knoxville Church), and Nidal Hasan (a jihadi sympathizer imprisoned for shooting fellow soldiers). Moreover, 53 attacks are “unidentified,” including failed attacks and “multiple attacks” that succeeded “sometimes.” Selective interpretation of second-hand reports with more than one-third of the cases unidentified hardly qualifies as reliable, much less representative of thousands of suicide attackers identified since the 1980s (Pape Reference Pape2010).
Besides this opportunity sample, and selective anecdotes about what a few rampage shooters and political terrorists purportedly said and did (rather than using systematically vetted sources such as court proceedings involving cross examinations), Lankford relies on two external studies. One is a dubiously relevant Secret Service evaluation of 83 persons who attempted political assassination, nearly all loners (rare among suicide terrorists until recently) with most having a history of mental illness. The other, by Merari et al. (Reference Merari, Diamant, Bibi, Broshi and Zakin2010), compares 15 “preemptively arrested” suicide attackers, 12 “regular terrorists,” and 14 “organizers of suicide attacks.” In personality tests, including some with questionable credibility pinpointing mental problems (Thematic Apperception, Rorschach), 6 failed suicide terrorists showed “suicidal tendencies” and 8 “depressive tendencies,” versus no suicidals and 4 depressives in the other two groups.
Now, people who failed in their life's mission, constantly reminded of that failure in prison, may be prone to low self-esteem, depression, even suicidal thoughts. Moreover, small sample size precludes conclusions regarding frequency differences between groups. Rather than examine representativeness, methods, or counter-arguments (Byrm & Araj Reference Brym and Araj2012), Lankford suggests that Merari et al. actually “underdiagnosed suicidality,” having “intentionally ignored the most obvious indicator that their subjects were suicidal … they had planned to blow themselves up” (p. 50).
While personality can be a factor (Tobeña Reference Tobeña, Oakley, Knafo, Madhavan and Wilson2011), Merari et al. conclude: “essentially, suicide attacks are a group phenomenon, and practically all of them have been planned and organized by groups rather than carried out by individuals on their own initiative” (Merari et al., Reference Merari, Diamant, Bibi, Broshi and Zakin2010, p. 97; cf. Pedhazur & Perlinger Reference Pedhazur and Perlinger2006). Lankford grants that: “On the surface … suicide terrorists usually work with [organizations], while the others almost always act on their own” (Lankford Reference Lankford2013c, p. 112). But he sees deep cause in the “critical similarity between certain suicide bombers, rampage shooters, and school shooters” expressed by Kruglanski's notion of “quest for personal significance” (p. 109), while omitting that for prospective martyrs “a crucial characteristic of the significance quest is its anchorage in [the group's] ‘sacred values’” (Kruglanski & Gelfand Reference Kruglanski and Gelfand2013, citing Atran et al. Reference Atran, Axelrod and Davis2007).
Space does not permit dissecting Lankford's account of Mohammed Atta and other “in-depth cases,” but I urge comparison with long-term studies of how suicide actions evolved through group dynamics (including discussion of personalities: Sageman Reference Sageman2008; see also, ARTIS 2009; Atran Reference Atran2010c). Lankford mentions “coercion” (as with Tamil Tigers), without distinguishing “pressure” from popular support (as in Palestine) and peer influence (as in the Madrid plot). Arguing physical coercion, he pretends to debunk as “total fabrication” depictions of Kamikaze as “courageous warriors” (pp. 132–133) based on cursory reading of a single reference. As Ohnuki-Tierney wrote me concerning Lankford's claims in her name: “The Japanese military was notorious for corporeal punishment. But, they did not do so for the purpose of coercing them to be pilots;” rather, “coercion” ensued from indirect “peer group pressure – once having gone through training together, it was hard [to refuse] – ‘I am saving my life; you guys go’. Hardly any died for the emperor, but some sought meaning … that their death will bring the rebirth of Japan without capitalism.” (Personal communication, July 2013; Ohnuki-Tierney Reference Ohnuki-Tierney2006, pp. 169, 197; cf. Tokkotai Senbotsusha 1990, on 340 army and naval academy volunteers).
Lankford maintains that “the suicide terrorist's death … does not increase likelihood of success nor the expected magnitude of destruction” (p. 45). Yet it gained Hezbollah and Hamas political prominence, and brought al-Qaeda global attention. In assessing damage from attempted suicide attacks in America (most of which failed or were unrelated to jihadis), he argues that 9/11 is the “exception” (p. 121). He disregards government data cited by Merari and others that suicide attacks constituted less than 1% of the total number of attacks, but caused more than 50% of the casualties in Israel-Palestine, and one-third of Iraqi casualties.
Lankford brushes off plausible strategic, ideological, group dynamical and other political, cultural, and social factors. (Why have Islamic Hezobollah and Hamas and the Marxist-Leninist PKK mostly abandoned suicide bombings?) His main prescription for “how to stop suicide terrorism” (pp. 151–175), by tracking and testing (many thousands of) potential suicidal personalities at home (and millions abroad), is likely a counterproductive diversion of time and resources. The book manifests a form of fundamental attribution error: the tendency – especially evident among those attached to the moral ideology of individual responsibility and independence of action – to overestimate effect of personality and underestimate situational effects in explaining social behavior (Norenzayan & Nisbett Reference Norenzayan and Nisbett2000).
Lankford's notion that publicly perceived “true” heroic actions involving self-sacrifice and killing of group enemies (including non-combatants) are almost always cause for sorrow rather than celebration (p. 104) is wrong for nearly all known cultures across recorded history (Ehrenreich Reference Ehrenreich1997). In qualifying suicide terrorists as “fake heroes” and cowards so afraid of life that they sacrifice nothing of worth when they die (as opposed to “real heroes” like winners of the Medal of Honor, possibly excluding the 27 awarded for massacring mostly Native American women and children at Wounded Knee), Lankford comforts the initial, ideologically driven assessment of much of our press, public, and political establishment.
Given that “by definition, suicidal terrorists are suicidal,” Lankford's book The Myth of Martyrdom (Lankford Reference Lankford2013c) reaches its conclusion before starting. Absent evidence of clinical morbidity or past suicide attempts, Lankford uses indicators such as “fleeting suicidal thoughts,” “risky life style,” and “suicide-like gestures,” which may subsume tens if not hundreds of millions of people. He claims to overthrow “the conventional wisdom” that suicide terrorists were “ordinary individuals before they were recruited and indoctrinated” (p. 4) through “brainwashing” (p. 12). But “brainwashing” hardly figures among experts cited. Rather, suicide terrorists are often portrayed as self-seekers propelled by: moral outrage against foreign occupation or perceived attacks on the Muslim community, a search for personal significance and glory in a sacred cause, and the group dynamics of peer influence and popular support. (On brainwashing as popular fiction, see Atran Reference Atran2010c; Sageman Reference Sageman2008).
Lankford charges that: “scholars and government experts continue to spread this terrorist propaganda” of self-sacrifice (p. 49), albeit unwittingly, because older academics unimaginative conformists “too scared of being wrong,” and so adopt a “less risky perspective” (pp. 3–4).
Consider: For Lankford, social scientists conduct surveys and interviews “because it gives them new, exclusive” data, ignoring “social or cultural biases” or that respondents “may be lying, with ulterior motives” (p. 21). Relevant social science, however, assumes mistrust of direct informant responses as revealing objective fact or truth (Atran & Medin Reference Atran and Medin2008). More so regarding terrorists: If I naively believed what jihadis told me, I'd be dead. And by what imagination does fieldwork with terrorists, including escaping from killers in Sulawesi's jungles or in a Lashkar-e-Taiba mosque in Kashmir, qualify as more risk-aversive than Lankford surveying others' data?
In full disclosure, I'm repeatedly pilloried for a passage in a Science article written over a decade ago: “no instances of religious or political suicide terrorism stem from lone actions of cowering or unstable bombers” (Atran Reference Atran2003, p. 1536). Then, there were no documented cases of lone-wolf psychopathology among the anarchist bombers, Japanese kamikaze, and jihadis described. Later, based on my field studies and collaborations across Eurasia and North Africa, I noted in publications and congressional testimony that suicide attacker profiles began changing markedly after 9/11: from mostly married, middle class, fairly well-educated men in their 20s and 30s recruited out of country, to mostly unmarried, marginal, less-educated young men in their teens and early 20s enlisting in-country and abroad. Self-seekers engaged in small, mutually supportive clusters of friends and fellow travelers, with little religious education but “born again” into radical Islam to find personal significance through a glorious cause, these were mostly young adults in transitional stages in life: students, immigrants, between jobs or girlfriends, away from family and seeking a new home (Atran Reference Atran2008; Reference Atran2011; Sageman Reference Sageman2008).
Groups differed. In Palestine, Hamas martyrdom volunteers were above the mean in education and socio-economic status, whereas Fatah's al-Aqsa' Martyrs Brigades were recruiting anyone they could (including children, wayward women, petty criminals) to compete with Hamas (70–80% of Palestinians consistently supported suicide attacks during the Second Intifada, with “joy” the most frequent accompanying emotion; Ginges et al. Reference Ginges, Atran, Medin and Shikaki2007). In Indonesia, Jemaah Islamiyah factions retained top religious and scientific echelons of select madrassas to plan operations (Magouirk & Atran Reference Magouirk and Atran2008), but sought “lost” youth outside madrassas to detonate and die. In Iraq, Zarqawi's al-Qaeda affiliate rushed young volunteers from Saudi Arabia and Yemen into suicide actions, but kept Algerian volunteers and others with previous fighting experience for sustained combat operations (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2007). In Afghanistan and Pakistan, Taliban funneled schoolboys from poor rural madrassas into suicide missions, whereas groups with international ambitions, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, engaged people with skill in languages and cultures, computers, and GPS, for attacks in India and elsewhere (Atran Reference Atran2010c).
Lankford ignores such group differences, presenting his own opportunity sample of 136 individuals as representative, including non-suicides such as Anders Breivik (a white supremacist imprisoned for killing Norwegian youth), Jim Adkisson (an anti-liberal imprisoned for attacking a Knoxville Church), and Nidal Hasan (a jihadi sympathizer imprisoned for shooting fellow soldiers). Moreover, 53 attacks are “unidentified,” including failed attacks and “multiple attacks” that succeeded “sometimes.” Selective interpretation of second-hand reports with more than one-third of the cases unidentified hardly qualifies as reliable, much less representative of thousands of suicide attackers identified since the 1980s (Pape Reference Pape2010).
Besides this opportunity sample, and selective anecdotes about what a few rampage shooters and political terrorists purportedly said and did (rather than using systematically vetted sources such as court proceedings involving cross examinations), Lankford relies on two external studies. One is a dubiously relevant Secret Service evaluation of 83 persons who attempted political assassination, nearly all loners (rare among suicide terrorists until recently) with most having a history of mental illness. The other, by Merari et al. (Reference Merari, Diamant, Bibi, Broshi and Zakin2010), compares 15 “preemptively arrested” suicide attackers, 12 “regular terrorists,” and 14 “organizers of suicide attacks.” In personality tests, including some with questionable credibility pinpointing mental problems (Thematic Apperception, Rorschach), 6 failed suicide terrorists showed “suicidal tendencies” and 8 “depressive tendencies,” versus no suicidals and 4 depressives in the other two groups.
Now, people who failed in their life's mission, constantly reminded of that failure in prison, may be prone to low self-esteem, depression, even suicidal thoughts. Moreover, small sample size precludes conclusions regarding frequency differences between groups. Rather than examine representativeness, methods, or counter-arguments (Byrm & Araj Reference Brym and Araj2012), Lankford suggests that Merari et al. actually “underdiagnosed suicidality,” having “intentionally ignored the most obvious indicator that their subjects were suicidal … they had planned to blow themselves up” (p. 50).
While personality can be a factor (Tobeña Reference Tobeña, Oakley, Knafo, Madhavan and Wilson2011), Merari et al. conclude: “essentially, suicide attacks are a group phenomenon, and practically all of them have been planned and organized by groups rather than carried out by individuals on their own initiative” (Merari et al., Reference Merari, Diamant, Bibi, Broshi and Zakin2010, p. 97; cf. Pedhazur & Perlinger Reference Pedhazur and Perlinger2006). Lankford grants that: “On the surface … suicide terrorists usually work with [organizations], while the others almost always act on their own” (Lankford Reference Lankford2013c, p. 112). But he sees deep cause in the “critical similarity between certain suicide bombers, rampage shooters, and school shooters” expressed by Kruglanski's notion of “quest for personal significance” (p. 109), while omitting that for prospective martyrs “a crucial characteristic of the significance quest is its anchorage in [the group's] ‘sacred values’” (Kruglanski & Gelfand Reference Kruglanski and Gelfand2013, citing Atran et al. Reference Atran, Axelrod and Davis2007).
Space does not permit dissecting Lankford's account of Mohammed Atta and other “in-depth cases,” but I urge comparison with long-term studies of how suicide actions evolved through group dynamics (including discussion of personalities: Sageman Reference Sageman2008; see also, ARTIS 2009; Atran Reference Atran2010c). Lankford mentions “coercion” (as with Tamil Tigers), without distinguishing “pressure” from popular support (as in Palestine) and peer influence (as in the Madrid plot). Arguing physical coercion, he pretends to debunk as “total fabrication” depictions of Kamikaze as “courageous warriors” (pp. 132–133) based on cursory reading of a single reference. As Ohnuki-Tierney wrote me concerning Lankford's claims in her name: “The Japanese military was notorious for corporeal punishment. But, they did not do so for the purpose of coercing them to be pilots;” rather, “coercion” ensued from indirect “peer group pressure – once having gone through training together, it was hard [to refuse] – ‘I am saving my life; you guys go’. Hardly any died for the emperor, but some sought meaning … that their death will bring the rebirth of Japan without capitalism.” (Personal communication, July 2013; Ohnuki-Tierney Reference Ohnuki-Tierney2006, pp. 169, 197; cf. Tokkotai Senbotsusha 1990, on 340 army and naval academy volunteers).
Lankford maintains that “the suicide terrorist's death … does not increase likelihood of success nor the expected magnitude of destruction” (p. 45). Yet it gained Hezbollah and Hamas political prominence, and brought al-Qaeda global attention. In assessing damage from attempted suicide attacks in America (most of which failed or were unrelated to jihadis), he argues that 9/11 is the “exception” (p. 121). He disregards government data cited by Merari and others that suicide attacks constituted less than 1% of the total number of attacks, but caused more than 50% of the casualties in Israel-Palestine, and one-third of Iraqi casualties.
Lankford brushes off plausible strategic, ideological, group dynamical and other political, cultural, and social factors. (Why have Islamic Hezobollah and Hamas and the Marxist-Leninist PKK mostly abandoned suicide bombings?) His main prescription for “how to stop suicide terrorism” (pp. 151–175), by tracking and testing (many thousands of) potential suicidal personalities at home (and millions abroad), is likely a counterproductive diversion of time and resources. The book manifests a form of fundamental attribution error: the tendency – especially evident among those attached to the moral ideology of individual responsibility and independence of action – to overestimate effect of personality and underestimate situational effects in explaining social behavior (Norenzayan & Nisbett Reference Norenzayan and Nisbett2000).
Lankford's notion that publicly perceived “true” heroic actions involving self-sacrifice and killing of group enemies (including non-combatants) are almost always cause for sorrow rather than celebration (p. 104) is wrong for nearly all known cultures across recorded history (Ehrenreich Reference Ehrenreich1997). In qualifying suicide terrorists as “fake heroes” and cowards so afraid of life that they sacrifice nothing of worth when they die (as opposed to “real heroes” like winners of the Medal of Honor, possibly excluding the 27 awarded for massacring mostly Native American women and children at Wounded Knee), Lankford comforts the initial, ideologically driven assessment of much of our press, public, and political establishment.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I thank the United States Defense Department's Minerva Program for supporting relevant research.