Mentally Retarded Women Used in Bombings

[JohnRich 4]

News:

Mentally Retarded Women Used in Bombings

BAGHDAD - Two mentally retarded women strapped with remote-control explosives—and possibly used as unwitting suicide bombers—brought carnage Friday to two pet bazaars, killing 73 people...

The women had Down syndrome and may not have known they were on suicide missions. He said the bombs were detonated by remote control...

Source: Breitbart.com

"Come here, darling. Wear this pretty vest for me, and then go pet the fuzzy little bunnies."

[christelsabine 1]

OK. Not nice.

And? Now you're personally appalled and decided to spend half of your income for retarded Iraqi and such. Yes?

dudeist skydiver # 3105

[Royd 0]

I know there's a short bus joke in there, somewhere.

[kallend 2,150]

Scum. Next poll.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[skydyvr 0]

Not much a poll - the votes for "courageous heroes!" almost assuredly translate to "let's fuck with JohnRich!".

. . =(_8^(1)

[billvon 3,119]

Are there any people with above-average intelligence who strap explosives on and blow themselves up?

[BillyVance 35]

Just goes to show these motherfucking pricks will do ANYTHING to get what they want.

"Mediocre people don't like high achievers, and high achievers don't like mediocre people." - SIX TIME National Champion coach Nick Saban

[Richards 0]

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Are there any people with above-average intelligence who strap explosives on and blow themselves up?

There is a difference between willfull stupidity and a genuine handicap. This is really sad.

My biggest handicap is that sometimes the hole in the front of my head operates a tad bit faster than the grey matter contained within.

[diablopilot 2]

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Are there any people with above-average intelligence who strap explosives on and blow themselves up?

Great point.

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You're not as good as you think you are. Seriously.

[martin-o 0]

I see your point but I'm afraid that the answer to your question is probably yes. Hate and intelligence isn't always correlating variables.

[Andy9o8 2]

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Are there any people with above-average intelligence who strap explosives on and blow themselves up?

Well, most of the 9/11 terrorists were pretty well-educated. They used aircraft and not strapped-on explosives to blow themselves up, but it was still quite deliberate.

[Skyrad 0]

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Are there any people with above-average intelligence who strap explosives on and blow themselves up?

Well, most of the 9/11 terrorists were pretty well-educated. They used aircraft and not strapped-on explosives to blow themselves up, but it was still quite deliberate.

They must have been exceptionally intelligent seeing as seven of the 19 named 9/11 hijackers are still alive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ixuf236Dk

http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/9-11/9-11_hijackers_still_alive.htm

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/hijackers.html

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[kelpdiver 2]

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Are there any people with above-average intelligence who strap explosives on and blow themselves up?

White hippie college kids, for one. They seem easily brainwashed.

I'm sure quite a few of the bombers have above average IQs. What they lack is decent education, by design by the powers that be in that part of the world.

[Skyrad 0]

Actualy you are wrong. Approximatly one in three suicide bombers in Palastine are university graduates. Of the remainder many have high school eduction.

http://www.tau.ac.il/jcss/sa/v6n2p5Kim.html

Of the four London Suicide bombers:

Mohammed Sidique Khan
Graduate of Leeds Metropolitan University

Shehzad Tanweer
Graduate of Leeds Metropolitan University

Hasib Hussain
GNVQ Business Studies

Germaine Lindsay
High school education

Many of the alledged hijackers on 9/11 were highly educated. Your misconception about the educational levels of suicide bombers is a dangerous one.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[nerdgirl 0]

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Approximatly one in three suicide bombers in Palastine are university graduates. Of the remainder many have high school eduction.



Many of the alledged hijackers on 9/11 were highly educated.

Doesn’t that make it even more of a travesty?

VR/Marg

Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying

[Skyrad 0]

Travesty? When the attacks are against civillians its murder pure and simple and that is always a travesty no matter what the killers level of understanding and education is.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[nerdgirl 0]

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Travesty? When the attacks are against civillians its murder pure and simple and that is always a travesty no matter what the killers level of understanding and education is.

Concur.

Parsing levels of travesty is a dangerous normative exercise perhaps better suited for philosophers, judges & juries.

Bad things and bad situations happen to all sorts of people. A few respond by channeling that experience to make the world a better place; a few kill themselves; a few abuse small animals, children, or their spouses/partners; and most just muddle along in the world.

All humans (above a certain minimal IQ) are responsible for their choices and consequences of those choices ... even if only in the ethical world of the things that keep them up at night.

If one is privileged and fortunate enough to have higher levels of education & knowledge, does it not make it even more of a travesty in that those individuals have no excuse for not having intellectual tools to make better choices and to pursue alternative courses of (re-)action?

VR/Marg

Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying

[kelpdiver 2]

But you'll agree they are of above average intelligence?

The only explanation I have for intelligent but powerless people blowing themselves up for the benefit of the few power elite is that their education is not very good.

[Skyrad 0]

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If one is privileged and fortunate enough to have higher levels of education & knowledge, does it not make it even more of a travesty in that those individuals have no excuse for not having intellectual tools to make better choices and to pursue alternative courses of (re-)action?

You pose a good question. I would argue however that it does not take a great level of knowledge to know that it is wrong to strap a bomb to ones self and detonate it in a market full of innocent bystanders. After that level of knowledge is reached then any surplus is irrelevant to the argument.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[Skyrad 0]

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But you'll agree they are of above average intelligence?

The only explanation I have for intelligent but powerless people blowing themselves up for the benefit of the few power elite is that their education is not very good.

It seems to me that you make the assumption that intelligent and educated people are not powerless people. In the west maube there is an argument for such a view but in other parts of the world the same is not true. I think that people blow themselfs up for various reasons fear, a feeling of helplessness, Anger, resentment, a lack of hope, too much hope, religious ferver, hate. Its a complicated area.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[Royd 0]

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If one is privileged and fortunate enough to have higher levels of education & knowledge, does it not make it even more of a travesty in that those individuals have no excuse for not having intellectual tools to make better choices and to pursue alternative courses of (re-)action?

Apparently, for some, the brainwashing of religion holds more sway than the brainwashing of intellectualism.

[kelpdiver 2]

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It seems to me that you make the assumption that intelligent and educated people are not powerless people. In the west maube there is an argument for such a view but in other parts of the world the same is not true.

I don't think people there are any different. I keep noticing that the Bin Ladens are willing to do suicide missions. Only the little people do. I'm looking for a reason why they would do so.

[nerdgirl 0]

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It seems to me that you make the assumption that intelligent and educated people are not powerless people. In the west maube there is an argument for such a view but in other parts of the world the same is not true. I think that people blow themselfs up for various reasons fear, a feeling of helplessness, Anger, resentment, a lack of hope, too much hope, religious ferver, hate. Its a complicated area.

Agree that it’s complicated. The ‘easy’ things are correspondingly easily solved … & less interesting, imo.

I was thinking in terms of ethics and philosophy, which would reasonably assert that people above a certain IQ and lacking severe incapacitation (e.g., persistent vegetative condition) do have “power” – over their own choices … even if those choices are bad & worse, such as the dilemma of “Sophie’s Choice.”

From more of a political science perspective, we can talk about power or empowerment in other terms, which I suspect you may be grounding your response (per the first line of your reply above).

And for over 25+ years, the ideas that you synopsized largely reflected the 'conventional wisdom'/assumptions regarding terrorist movements (particularly the motivation you note in the 3rd line of your response -- “feeling of helplessness”), which was challenged by 9-11. It’s a puzzle of the radical Islamist movement. (The other piece of ‘conventional wisdom’ that 9-11 challenged was Brian Jenkin's old aphorism that "Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.”) My speculation is that it is due to the shift to religiously oriented terrorists (as opposed to the separatists/anti-Colonials/secular leftists that dominated the 1960s-1980s.)

Focusing on Al Qa’eda and the affiliated radical Islamists/extreme global Salafist movement (as the latter executed the terrorist act in the OP): we all know that Usama bin Laden came from a wealthy Yemeni family that made a fortunate through the construction business in Saudi Arabia. Ayman al-Zawahiri is an Egyptian-born pediatrician from a well-regarded middle class family. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was from a mid-upper class Kuwaiti family, who were able to send him to school in North Carolina. Saif al-Adel (the ‘mastermind’ behind the bombings of US embassies in Kenya & Tanzania in the late 1990s) was a Colonel in the Egyptian Army. Short biographies of lesser known members from the DNI show the same pattern. The leaders of Al Qa’eda and the radical Islamist movement do not reflect the disempowered of the world.

Historically there have been a few ‘terrorists’ who have come from horrifically disempowered beginnings/backgrounds. India’s Bandit Queen, Phoolan Devi, immediately comes to mind. She was a dalit from Uttar Pradesh who was sold as a child bride to man at least 20 years older (some accounts suggest as many as 40 years) than her who brutally raped, abused, and eventually dis-owned her. She was gang-raped by the police before becoming a dacoit.

Although one of her most well-known quotes (that I have easily on-hand) after her election to the Indian Parliament in 1996, suggests an even more complicated perspective:

"This is nice, being in society.
But I felt more powerful then, when I was a bandit.
Sometimes I think I shouldn't have surrendered."

What those who are “powerless”, “helpless”, or otherwise disenfranchised from civil society do provide is the underlying base of tacit &/or explicit support upon which all non-state actors have some dependence. And bringing us back to Iraq, I assert that much of the current success in Anbar province is due to the local populace re-acting to the AQ-affiliated insurgents who had been terrorizing them. When AQ in Iraq began trying to enforce their ‘law’ over tribal ‘law,’ including the execution of at least a couple minor tribal leaders (sheiks) or sons of sheiks, the local leaders were angered. What conclusion can one come to when some other force is considered “brutal” compared to Hussayn and his ruling Baathist party? The presence of additional Iraqi Army and (mostly) US Marines Corps troops (part of “the surge”) and the resulting increased security & stabilization of the area was necessary but not sufficient alone to enable the Iraqi populace of Anbar to feel empowered enough to remove tacit support for AQ in Iraq. (Still need effective transition and reconstruction to lower the threat of AQI returning ... it’s been at least a week since I’ve worked SSTR into a thread .)

VR/Marg

Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying

[nerdgirl 0]

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I don't think people there are any different. I keep noticing that the Bin Ladens are willing to do suicide missions. Only the little people do. I'm looking for a reason why they would do so.

A few years ago, I did some work looking at the motivation of female suicide bombers as part of the Palestinian intifada. Most of those women were motivated to kill themselves (or attempt to) due to pressure they felt was coming from their families to redeem themselves for having done something that was perceived as bringing shame to the family. The families, in most cases, didn't suggest implicitly or explicity that they become suicide bombers or join a terrorist group. IIRC, all were under 30. IIRC, a majority had completed college, were in college, or had dropped out.

Most were perceived or perceived themselves as ‘failing’ somehow as women and a number were specifically and explicity recruited with the message and rhetoric that becoming a ‘martyr’ would restore honor to their families.

VR/Marg

Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying

[JohnRich 4]

Wow, seven people so far think that the men who blow up dozens of families while they are out buying puppies for their children, are "courageous freedom-fighting heroes". Simply amazing...

Heck, I'll bet if they massacred an entire school full of toddlers, these seven voters would nominate them for a Medal of Honor.

Do any of you seven have the guts to come forth and explain your position?

You can start by explaining how you think blowing up innocent Muslim families, furthers the cause of Muslim freedom.

I'm betting that not a damned one of you has the guts to speak up.