Vonnegut sheds light, again

Submitted by lonesome moderate (United States), Jun 19, 2006 at 09:11

I don't agree with Kurt Vonnegut's value judgments, about terrorism and many other things. But his statements explain the dynamic behind the creation of suicide bombers better than anything else I have read on the subject. My local newspaper just came out with three long opinion pieces purporting to explain the reasons behind suicide bombing, and none explained it half as well as Vonnegut did in a few provocative lines.

So long as the Arab world is churning out millions of barely educated young men with little hope of accomplishing anything that would give them self-respect by any means other than a suicide bombing, then there will be more suicide bombers. And, yes, the reasons they are held in high regard on the Arab street are universal. People who show physical courage in dying for a cause are always held in high regard by others who believe in the same cause. I have no doubt that our refusal to honestly look at simple truths like this is crippling the war on terror, and we will continue to shed a lot of blood unnecessarily because of this.

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