Through its fundamentalism, some Muslim cultures tend to intensify all of Durkheim’s motives for suicide to create the Muslim martyrs. By understanding the suicide bomber’s motives, economic, social, and religious, we learn its causes. By looking closely at the causes, we gain insight into how to eliminate them in order to solve the problem at its roots in a peaceful way.
Until now, the U.S. has supported oppressive, fascist regimes in its “client states” of the Middle East. We must change this economic and political situation in order to eliminate the terrorist’s martyrdom.
Though changing the economic and political situation is no simple task. It's run by elite owners of wealth and vested power.
We can also take lessons from these causes for suicide as reasons for the high levels of suicide and crime within our own country.
In the Old Testament, Samson committed an act of suicide terrorism when he brought down the Philistine temple and killed thousands of his oppressors. He was in an extremely helpless situation.
In the New Testament, Christ, along with thousands of other Jews, willingly went into a martyr’s crucifixion as a form of defiance against the Roman Empire’s oppression. They had few alternatives. Likewise, in the Middle East, economic and social despair lead people to this terrorist’s martyrdom because they are left without even a glimmer of hope to live with dignity and respect.
