The West has its own suicide bombers

~

The actor Will Smith is no one's image of a suicide bomber. With his boyish face, he has often played comic roles. Even as the last man on earth in I Am Legend, he retains a wise-cracking, ironic demeanor.

And yet, surrounded by a horde of hyperactive vampires at the end of that film, Smith clasps a live grenade to his chest and throws himself at the enemy in a final burst of heroic sacrifice.

Wait a second: surely that wasn't a suicide bombing? Will Smith wasn't reciting suras from the Koran. He wasn't sporting one of those rising-sun headbands that the Japanese kamikaze wore for their suicide missions. He wasn't playing a religious fanatic or a political extremist.

Will Smith was the hero of the film. So how could he be a suicide bomber? After all, he's one of us, isn't he?

As it happens, we have our suicide bombers too. "We" are the powerful, developed countries, the ones with an overriding concern for individual liberties and individual lives. "We" form a moral archipelago that encompasses the United States, Europe, Israel, present-day Japan and occasionally Russia.

Whether in real war stories or inspiring vignettes served up in fiction and movies, our lore is full of heroes who sacrifice themselves for motherland, democracy, or simply their band of brothers.

Admittedly, these men weren't expecting 72 virgins in paradise and they didn't make film records of their last moments, but our suicidal heroes generally have received just as much praise and recognition as "their" martyrs.

The scholarly work on suicide bombers is large and growing. Most of these studies focus on why those other people do such terrible things, sometimes against their own compatriots but mainly against us.

According to the popular view, Shi'ite or Tamil or Chechen suicide martyrs have a fundamentally different attitude toward life and death.

If, however, we have our own rich tradition of suicide bombers - and our own unfortunate tendency to kill civilians in our military campaigns - how different can these attitudes really be?

~