Journal of Diplomatic Language

JOURNAL OF DIPLOMATIC LANGUAGE
JDL I:4 (2004)

On the Self-Defeating Language of Martyrs and Homicide Bombers

Dr. Avery Plaw
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec

This article examines the strategic vocabularies that sprung up in the War on Terror around the phenomenon of suicide bombing. It argues that both the Jihadists' langugage of 'martyrdom operations' and the White House's language of 'homicide bombering' reveal not only something of that sides' ideological strategy against the other, but also of its sense of the vulnerability of its own ideological position.

The War on Terror is also a "battle for public opinion" being fought on the planes of language.¹ What the organs of Islamic Jihad celebrate as "martyrdom operations," the 'Leader of the Free World' denounces as "homicide bombings." This battle of vocabularies is hardly surprising. It has long been a commonplace of politics that descriptive language influences public reception - it is hard, for example, not to appear unamerican when decrying a Committee on Unamerican activities, or unpatriotic when criticizing a Patriot Act. Indeed, adept manipulation of language is a key component of the contemporary art of 'political spin'. By the same token, it has also been emphasized in recent years that a careful deconstruction of descriptive language can often reveal a great deal about the underlying political agenda that informs it. A final point that is less frequently noted, however, is that language is not infinitely malleable, that you have to work with words that are already there, with their own unique complexes of meaning and association. By consequence, the semantic advancement of a political agenda in one direction will often produce unintended countervailing effects in another which may threaten to destabilize the initial construction or undermine its purpose.

In the following brief discussion I will try to show that all of these insights are well evidenced in the diplomatic language emerging from both sides of the ongoing War on Terror around the phenomenon widely known as suicide-bombing. In short, both the descriptive vocabularies of the Jihadists and the U.S. Government are obviously intended to frame the same phenomenon in terms of larger (and clashing) political agendas and to win battles of public opinion, but, on investigation, both can also be seen to constrain or undermine those same agendas in important ways.²

Before turning to the specific competing languages of martyrs and homicide bombers, a brief review of the more standard diplomatic and journalistic language will help to orient the discussion. Both the United Nations and the bulk of the Western media generally employ the terminology of 'suicide bombing,' and for obvious reasons.³ They are talking mainly about people deliberately exploding bombs in public places which destroy them and anyone else with the misfortune to be in the vicinity. The act is most literally a combination of committing suicide and terrorist bombing rolled into one. The term suicide bombing then is accurately descriptive without offering very much in the way of overt evaluation.

More than that, however, the expression 'suicide bombing' also highlights the qualities which most importantly distinguish the act from other forms of familiar political violence - for example, from harassment or riots or shooting people or planting bombs in order to attract attention to some political agenda.⁴ It is the suicide element which most strikingly differentiates this new form of attack in two senses: (1.) acts of deliberate political self-destruction have relatively few prominent precedents (such as self-immolating Buddhist monks during the Vietnam war, or IRA hunger strikers), and fewer still that involve violence towards others; (2.) it is the suicide element which is most psychologically disturbing and in practice so difficult to stop (and hence again terrifying) - if the intention is to die, then the 'suicide bomber' seems virtually unstoppable.⁵

So the terminology of suicide bombing seems particularly apt. Yet both the main organizations which claim responsibility for such acts of terror, and the leadership of the War on Terror, have adopted their own languages, each intended to deemphasize exactly this distinctive feature, albeit in different ways and for different reasons. The question begged in both cases is 'why?'

II.

On one side, the Islamic political organizations which have pioneered the suicide bombing strategy in the modern era (Hezbollah, and later Hamas and Al-Qaeda⁶ ) systematically describe such actions as 'martyrdom operations,' and deliberately downplay the reference to suicide. The reason seems fairly straightforward for, as Christoph Reuter observes in his recent My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing (2004), "Few things have been a greater taboo in Islam than suicide."⁷ The taboo is not merely a central element of both Shi'a and Sunni traditions of observance, but derives directly from verses of the Qur'an itself. Surah 25 of part 5 of the Qur'an, has been variously translated, but is generally held to refer (at least in part) to suicide: "Don't kill yourself either! For God is mercifull!" elsewhere "Don't become a suicide…!" and again " don't kill those who share your own faith" (including, presumably, oneself).⁸ Indeed, a tradition "ascribed to the prophet Mohammed names suicide" as among the "unforgivable crimes."⁹ At any rate, death "by one's own hand is unambiguously condemned in the works of those who hand down the prophets dictums, the hadiths."¹⁰ In short, suicide is a blasphemy in the eyes of God (rejecting his gift of life, and presuming to decide things over which God alone has authority), and leads, as the Mufti of Jericho, Sheikh Muhammad Ismail al-Jamal put it in an April 2001 Fatwa, "straight to hell."¹¹ Not every Moslem (especially the more secular) necessarily accepts such pronouncements, but there is a good deal of evidence many involved in martyrdom operations do.¹²

By designating suicide bombings as martyrdom operations, Jihadists not only obscure the potentially sacrilegious elements of the act, but also re-integrate it within the religious tradition as among the most admirable of acts, and moreover as one that is traditionally connected with Islamic Jihad. Warriors who died fighting the enemy on behalf of Islam (of one form or another) have traditionally been revered as shahid or martyrs (although traditionally they didn't deliberately kill themselves, or indeed random civilians). Shi'ites, for example, especially venerate the memory of Hussein ibn Ali and his seventy-two companions who fought to the last man at Karbala in the year 680ce rather than retreat before the Caliph Yazid's forces. Such martyrs are viewed as especially blessed and are reserved a special place in paradise (and rewarded by the companionship, in some not entirely clear sense, of seventy-two dark eyed beauties).

By casting suicide bombing as 'martyrdom' then, Jihadists draw on powerful religious and cultural traditions which help to justify and motivate such actions. These are obviously tremendously important considerations, but they are also attended by problems both within the Islamic tradition and with opportunity costs in terms of the political struggle outside of the Islamic world. Most importantly, as I will explain at the end of this section, the terminology of martyrdom produce some countervailing effects within the Islamic world itself which threaten to destabilize the whole Jihadist enterprise.

In the first place, the invocation of the Islamic terminology of martyrdom obviously requires justification in terms of Shari'a law, and specifically the introduction of a distinction between the traditional idea of suicide and this new form of martyrdom. Diverse scholars, Imams and Jihadists, have deployed different strategies, but no consensus or clearly compelling line of argument has yet emerged. Sheikh Naim Qassem of Hezbollah, for example, has argued that because Moslems believe that the time of their deaths is predetermined, that therefore the martyr does not really choose the time but "only the manner in which he seeks to die," and is therefore not really killing himself.¹³ Of course, according to this logic, there could be no suicides at all (rendering Islam's contrary injunctions meaningless).

For Dr. Abdelaziz al-Rantisi of the political wing of Hamas, the distinction rather depends on one's state of mind when carrying out the action. He has declared that "he who wants to kill himself because he is sick of being alive - that's suicide. But if someone wants to sacrifice his soul in order to defeat the enemy and for God's sake - well, then he's a martyr."¹⁴ Suicide bombers must then be very careful about their state of mind during their actions and not allow themselves to become depressed or to rationalize their choices by diminishing the beauty of life. Moreover, the two conditions of mind that Dr. Rantisi distinguishes are not mutually exclusive. One wonders what the consequence is for someone who chooses to sacrifice himself for God's sake because he's sick of life. On the other hand, according to this logic, any suicide (bomber or not) who, at the last moment, desired to sacrifice himself on God's behalf would become ipso facto a martyr, for these matters are determined by state of mind not by result.

In sharp contrast to this last subjectivist line of thinking, Sheikh Hussein Fadlallah of Lebanon, the most influential Shi'ite cleric outside Iran, after initially casting doubt on any distinction, later changed tacks and suggested that the religious status of such human 'explosions' depended on an objective criterion - the number of the enemy killed; so that, presumably, a bomber who killed none or, say, one would be a suicide, but a bomber who wiped out a kindergarten, say, would be a martyr. Beyond reversing one's normal moral expectations (where killing more people is punished rather than rewarded), this criterion would have the curious consequence that the bomber's spiritual reward might not be determined at the moment of death, nor would be entirely within the bomber's control. It might well have to await the fate of the injured: if many eventually died, the bomber might be elevated to martyr status, but if all survived, the reward might be a suicide's eternity in hell. Martyr status would then be contingent on the hardiness and will to live of the infidel. This distinction seems to turn martyr operations into a high-stakes gamble.

At any rate, the point that I am trying to make here is that no consensus, and arguably no compelling argument, has emerged around the distinction between martyr operations and suicide - although presumably the precise criterion is of no small significance to those involved in the activity. The instability of this distinction marks a serious potential problem for the practitioners of 'martyr operations.'

The use of the language of 'martyr operations' and the de-emphasis of the suicidal component of such activities also raises certain opportunity costs in relation to the non-Islamic world. For example, it is precisely the suicide element which lends such violent actions much of (1.) their ideological impact especially outside of the Arab world. Voluntary self-destruction is an unquestionably sincere form of ultimate protest against social and political conditions which, it is naturally inferred (and not without justice) must be truly appalling.¹⁵ Suicide effectively dramatizes deprivation. It makes bombers victims of their own violence, with whom outsiders may sympathize. In this way, suicide attacks may not only draw attention to political grievances, but also elicit understanding, even sympathy. They may thus genuinely advance a political cause.

It is also the suicidal element of the bombing attacks that (2.) generate much of their special terror. If the bombers deliberately embrace their own destruction (and can conceal their explosive means), how could one possibly be safe from them without renouncing humanity as a whole and pursuing isolation? There is no effective deterrent or means of detection and ultimately no safety against one who wants to die. For similar reasons, suicide attacks are, as Robert Pape observes, "generally more destructive that other terrorist attacks," particularly in terms of fatalities.¹⁶ For these reasons, the "suicide" element in such bombings conduces to a unique type of fear.

Moreover, the insistence on characterizing their acts as 'martyrdom operations' rather than "suicide bombing" suggests both (3.) a degree of fanaticism and irrationality, at least from an outside perspective, which tends to undermine the credibility of an associated political cause; and (4.) a reward to which the martyrs aspire, both in terms of their families' social status on this Earth and in terms of their own rewards in the life to come, both of which work to displace the political motive. The fanatic acts out of faith and commitment (all too often misdirected) not out of the depths of political and social injustice. Moreover, (5.) by introducing the language of martyrdom, Jihadist organizations deliberately forego the opportunity to frame their struggle in terms which cultures outside their own will recognize, and with which they may sympathize (such as revolutionaries, freedom fighters, guerillas, soldiers and the like, but even 'suicide bomber' would be less alien and threatening than 'martyr').

It is worth emphasizing here that suicide bombing campaigns are characteristically very much concerned with the psychological impact they produce on the communities they attack, and particularly with the objective of promoting internal discord and dissension. Robert Pape has observed, for example, that all modern campaigns of suicide bombing, from Palestine to the United States, to Spain, Turkey and Sri Lanka, have been directed against democratic governments, because, among other things, they are seen as most v¹⁷ulnerable to panic, confusion and moral doubt on the part of their domestic populations. Nothing would do more to paralyze the governments which suicide bombers attack, and to encourage compromise, appeasement and retreat, than the emergence of internal public dispute over the legitimacy of the suicide bomber's cause (if not their means) or over the practical futility of trying to prevent future attacks.

Despite all of these potential advantages, however, Jihadist organizations have proven reluctant to adopt the standard language of suicide bombing. The willingness of these organizations to forego all of these significant opportunities to discomfit their opponents by employing a less-charged self-descriptive language begins to suggest an acute sensitivity to the fragility of their own ability to motivate suicide bombers on purely political grounds, and even to justify themselves to their own communities. Indeed, it begins to suggest that the Islamic Jihad may be far more fragile than it might at first appear.

Moreover, the very attempt to legitimate suicide bombing through the language of martyrdom generates a possibility of crisis. Thus far, the clerical community and Moslem believers have generally reconciled themselves to the legitimation of suicide bombing because it is the most powerful weapon in the Jihadists' arsenal. Yet, Jihadists are not satisfied merely by suppressing, by one means or another, the potentially serious religious objections to suicide bombings, they also insist on appropriating key religious notions (such as martyrdom) and rewards (such as paradise) to advance their purposes. Yet, as they become increasingly dependent on what Gal Luft has called the poor man's 'H-Bomb', and the attacks become more frequent and brutal, they also become increasingly difficult to square with the tradition of martyrdom.¹⁸ Indeed, some important religious authorities have already begun to express profound reservations about suicide bombings directed against civilians. Immediately following the September 11 attack, probably the most popular Sunni Theologian in the world, Sheikh Yussuf al-Qaradwi, host of a popular Al-Jazeera television show, declared "Our hearts bleed… despite our rejection of the U.S. policy towards Israel…. Even in times of war, muslims are forbidden to kill civilians indiscriminately. This is a loathsome crime." He emphasized in particular that the attacks were not martyrdom operations and the perpetrators would not enter paradise.¹⁹

Similarly, Sheikh Fadlallah, the senior Shi'ite religious authority in Lebanon, declared, immediately following September 11, 2001, "Nothing can justify the murder of thousands of innocent civilians. No religion justifies such a thing. The Islamic resistance in Lebanon never killed civilians. All those who were killed were Israeli soldiers!"²⁰ Strikingly, Sheikh Fadlallah's denunciation of the September 11 attack because of the murder of civilians would also apply to most Palestinian suicide bombings inside Israel, and if there is no religious justification for such attacks then not only are those that commit them in no way martyrs, but they are in fact suicides, blaspheming against Allah at the same moment that they murder women and children - in short, they are terrible sinners bound for eternal torment (to which they immediately deliver themselves).

Indeed, something along exactly these lines was suggested in April 2001 by Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz bin-Abdullah al-Ashaikh who declared that "the Shari'a provided no justification" for "so-called suicide attacks." "Such attacks," he insisted, "are not part of the Jihad, and I fear that they are just suicides plain and simple. Although the Qur'an permits, indeed demands, that the enemy be killed, this has to happen in such a way that it doesn't run contrary to religious laws."²¹ Sheikh al-Ashaikh's declaration has been attacked with special savagery in many quarters of the Moslem world (characterized, in particular, as the "American Fatwa"), but the very intensity of this reaction reveals the tremendous tension and high stakes produced by the adoption of language of martyrdom to describe suicide bombing.

III.

This tension makes it all the more astonishing that the Bush administration, in prosecuting its war on terror, should choose from April 2002 onwards to reject the language of suicide bombing in favor of 'homicide bombing' (a formulation that is widely attributed to the then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer). Some Western news outlets, such as Fox and the New York Post have also adopted the administration's terminology, and the Israeli government has also begun frequently to employ the 'homicide bomber' formulation. The question that this strategic choice begs, however, is why would the U.S. (and Israeli) administration(s) not push the association with suicide that their radical Islamic enemies are desperate to avoid? The answer seems to be that once again that they are not so much interested in destabilizing their enemies as in securing their domestic audience. Here, the same logic explained above again applies. The suicide element in such acts of terrorism tends to make the perpetrators look like they too are victims and hence to lend credibility to their cause. 'Homicide', by contrast, is a felony, which can only be further magnified by the addition of 'bombing.' So 'homicide bomber' lacks even the margin of legitimacy inhering in 'suicide bomber', and is therefore a better tool for consolidating ideological support for the War on Terror.

Of course, the 'homicide bombing' formulation incurs a range of difficulties. In the first place, it has been widely noted that the formulation is basically redundant: terrorist bombings intend homicide by their nature; insisting on homicide bombing is a little like calling someone convicted of homicide a killing murderer. Moreover, and for the same reason, under the U.S. terminology homicide bombings are totally undistinguished from any other terrorist bombing - indeed, the only distinction from every major act of terrorism ever committed is the specification that a bomb was used. It is by no means obvious why the issue of the weapon used (a homicide bomb as opposed to a homicide gun or homicide gas or homicide missile) is the important consideration, as opposed to, for example, whether the terrorist was or was not willing to sacrifice his or her own life to advance a political message. Thirdly, in terms of the American objective of mobilizing as wide a consensus as possible, the use of distinctive and pointed terminology, like 'homicide bomber', is often counter-productive, especially in-so-far as it is not widely adopted by allied powers and groups within American society itself. On the one hand then, it tends to be unnecessarily divisive rather than consensus-producing. On the other hand, it tends to lend credibility to the rhetoric from terrorists suggesting that the U.S. and Israelis are prosecuting their own self-serving agenda in the Middle-East and in that pursuit trying to impose a hegemonic ideological paradigm on the region. Again then, like the Jihadists, the American (and to lesser extent the Israeli) leadership in the war on terror seems willing to forego the opportunity to take the rhetorical offensive in the war on terror (and to demonstrate a wider international consensus regarding terrorism) in order to promote a consolidation of political opinion within its own domestic constituency. Again, this seems to bespeak a sense of fragility concerning the uniformity of domestic opinion.

IV.

In sum then, the analysis of the language deployed by the two sides of the war on terrorism reveals not only a good deal about their competing strategies, but also of the dangerously double-edged character of the rhetoric they feel compelled to employ. Not only does it show the overriding immediate priorities that they share (to consolidate their domestic constituencies) but also something about the kinds of opportunities they are willing to forego to do it (to semantically take the war to the enemy). It further suggests strong reasons why both sides, but especially the American, might consider a strategic shift in the language they deploy around suicide bombing. Finally, this analysis suggests that both sides sense fragility in the coalitions of force that empower them, and this in turn suggests the hope that the war need not necessarily be as indefinitely protracted as both sides and most pundits are suggesting today.

Notes

¹Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p 19.
²I don't mean to deny that some non-Islamic organizations, such as the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) or the Kurdistan People's Party (PKK) have also made extensive and sometimes innovative use of the suicide bomb (see, for example, Reuter, p. 155 - 66). It was, however, Islamic organizations (like Hezbollah) who pioneered the strategy and the descriptive language and who are the main object (most particularly Al Qaeda) of the War on Terror.
³See, for example, the Secretary General's statement: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2002/sgsm8195.doc.htm.
⁴Robert A. Pape, "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review 97:3 (August 2003), p. 343.
⁵ Pape, p. 346 - 7; see also Christoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 3 - 4; also see Gal Luft, "The Palestinian H-Bomb: Terror's Winning Strategy," Foreign Affairs, July/August 2002, p. 5 - 7.
⁶ For pattern of dissemination, see Hilal Khashan, "Collective Palestian Frustration and Suicide Bombings," Third World Quarerly, 24:6 (2003), p. 1050; also see Reuter, p. 12.
⁷ Reuter, p. 118.
⁸Ibid.
⁹Ibid, p. 119.
¹⁰ Ibid; also see Franz Rosenthal, "On Suicide in Islam," in the Journal of the American Islamic Society 66 (1946), p. 245.
¹¹Al-Hayat al-Jahida (Palestinian Daily Paper, April 27, 2001), quoted in Reuter, p. 123.
¹²See, for example, Jerrold M. Post, Ehud Sprinzak and Laurita M. Denny, "The Terrorists in their own Words: Interviews with 35 Incarcerated Middle Easter Terrorists," Terrorism and Political Violence 15:1 (2003), p. 174, 179-80.
¹³ Hala Jabar, Hezbollah (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 86. (64)
¹⁴ quoted in Reuter, p 115; Post, Sprinzak and Denny quote an incarcerated terrorist making much the same distinction, p. 179.
¹⁵ Martyrdom, by contrast, is not always chosen, and therefore while it can, it does not necessarily have, the same political connotations.
¹⁶ Pape, p. 346.
¹⁷ Ibid, p. 349 - 50.
¹⁸ Gal Luft, p. 2.
¹⁹Quoted in Reuter from Al-Jazeera, September 12, 2001 - see p. 116 and p. 187.
²⁰Quoted by Reuter from The Daily Star, September 14, 2001 and confirmed by his own interview - see ps. 78 and 185.
²¹ from Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, April 21, 2001, quoted in Reuter, p. 123.

Commentary

Home.