Essay On Suicide Terrorism

The biggest challenge that the United States faces, according to the members within the United States National Security establishment, is terrorism. While suicide terrorism is not the only form of terrorism the United States has been faced with, it has recently been growing into the more common type of terrorism in this age. There are several theories that are associated with suicide terrorism, such as those of Robert Pape and David Horowitz, and it is interesting to analyze and compare the theories and ideas of these intellectuals.

First, it is important to understand what exactly suicide terrorism is. Suicide terrorism is an attacking tactic involving one or more persons sacrificing their own life or lives in a violent method that affects another society with the overall intentions of intimidation and coercion of the particular society or government that was attacked. A fairly recent and national example of suicide terrorism is the September 11th attack on the United States in 2001. The United States was the victim of a series of four terrorist attacks that were made by the Islamic terrorist group, al-Qaeda, in New York City, and near Washington D.C. Several members of the terrorist group forfeited their lives in order to make this attack take place.

Even though suicide terrorism has been a part of international politics for a long period of time, there are still many questions that are left unanswered about the tactic. One of the most interesting and obvious questions for suicide terrorism, is simply as to why groups use this as a terrorism tactic. Many believe that this form of terrorism is a result of religious beliefs. However, this is mainly due to the western focus on the Islamic group of terrorists. The Islamic terrorist...

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...ved with a religion that take part in suicide terrorism, does not mean that every member of that religion is in support of it. This is comparable to the religious hatred that was present during the Holocaust. While Horowitz is not suggesting that we should contain all of the members of the Islamic organizations as the Jews were in the concentration camps, he is making it obvious that he has a hatred for these groups, and that all that believe in and practice the Muslim faith are to be held accountable for the terrorist actions that have taken place. Making a religious prejudice apparent is not only incredibly unfair, but is going to also cause further problems and will most likely lead to more violence and suicide terrorism for the discrimination. Robert Pape’s theories do not discriminate and give a logical explanation as to why these terrorist assaults take place.