[memo} http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18256より

自爆テロは、孤独で貧困で捨て身になった人が行うものという一般に流布しがちなイメージは誤りで、むしろ特定の政治的目的を持った組織によってリクルートされ、主義を教え込まれ、爆発物を提供される場合がほとんど、ということ。

たとえば、イスラエルの学者Ami Pedahzurは、

Social support for suicide terrorism, of the "culture of death," as it is described in other places, is very rarely a grassroots phenomenon. The organization's leadership is engaged in trying to mobilize support and one of the prominent ways of doing this—among societies which are oppressed and feel weak and hopeless—is by supplying heroes and hope.

という。また、Many of those who undertake suicide missions are above the norm in schooling and income　であり、また９・１１の首謀者　Mohamed Atta, the attack ringleader, was the son of a Cairo lawyer who defended a master's thesis in urban planning at his Hamburg university　という事実もある。

では、その主要な動機は何かと言えば、

A review of the records and accounts of over 180 Palestinian suicide bombers confirmed that close to half of them—and a larger number during the years of the Al-Aqsa Intifada—embarked on their suicide missions shortly after they had lost a very close person. This person could have been a friend, family member or lover.

近親者の死への報復が、目につくということ。さらに、興味深い事実として、女性の自爆テロの場合には、

Mia Bloom in her study Dying to Kill suggests that having been a victim of sexual violence may be a motive for the surprisingly large number of female bombers. ・・・For such victims, there may be no way back into traditional society, and a suicide attack on the enemy may be one way to restore lost "honor."

という痛ましい事実があることも指摘。

特に注目すべきは、

Virtually all the organizations that have used suicide attacks have been fighting to evict an occupying power from a national homeland. Usually the conflicts are extremely "asymmetric" (to use the current jargon), with the occupier enjoying vast superiority in weaponry and resources.

という点。

Robert Papeは、テロへ最善の処方箋は、「撤退（withdrawal）」だという。なぜならテロの原因は、対外勢力による占領ないし抑圧にあること

By his estimate, Islamist groups account for no more than 34.6 percent of the suicide terrorist attacks staged in the past twenty years. The real common denominator of suicide terrorism campaigns, he argues, is that they are all, in one form or another, responses to occupation or foreign control of a national homeland.

また、いわゆる「文明の衝突」は、誤った認識であること

As Pape points out, during the period between 1995 and 2003 there were no suicide terrorists from deeply Islamic countries such as Libya, Iran, Syria, and Sudan which had no US military presence of any kind.

結論としては、

Al-Qaeda is less a transnational network of like-minded ideologues brought together from across the globe via the Internet than a cross-national military alliance of national liberation movements working together against what they see as a common imperial threat. For al-Qaeda, religion matters, but mainly in the context of national resistance to foreign occupation.

と考えられるから。

一方、社会学者のFarhad Khosrokhavarは

young second-generation Pakistanis, many of whom are highly educated and who are fascinated by the important role the association [with jihad] gives them: they are the vanguard of the new Islamic world that is about to come into being. They therefore feel that they have a prophetic role to play in their parents' country of origin. That allows them to recover much of the dignity they have lost in Western societies, where they feel themselves to be the object of scorn and an almost palpable racism. Although they are not excluded from society, these young men are deeply discontented because of the discrimination they suffer. They have no access to the jobs and opportunities for which their level of education and their abilities qualify them. They have been insidiously marginalised by stigmatisation and racism, and their imaginary amplifies the effects of both.
Because they feel themselves to be victims, they explain their failures in terms of their stigma, but they lose sight of their own inability to adapt to the new constraints of modern society. They also feel a vague but crushing sense of guilt about their parents' societies, especially when, like Pakistan, most Arab countries or even Afghanistan (which is Pashtu-speaking; the language is similar to Urdu) are hit by crises. Thanks to these associations, they become Islam's world actors, and they can therefore feel that they are reestablishing their links with the Islamic societies from which they have been cut off. They also have the impression that, as actors, they are more important than the Western societies that stigmatise them believe them to be. In symbolic terms, this allows them to feel superior to the West that despises them.

と述べる。つまり、社会的、階級的、人種的理由による疎外や差別をイスラム的紐帯を形成することで克服しようとしているのだと主張する。
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