[jaguar]

There was an excellent article in the Independent today (at the fairly insane price of 5.50SFr over here grr) from a columnist who lives and works in beruit. His hyphothisis on the motives for suicide bombers in this scenario makes more sense than any Iàve heard. Shortened right down, it goes something like this.

Like early western explorers were quite taken by idea of harems but disgusted by other practices in the east, many muslims today are very tempted by the sexual freedoms and other freedoms of and living in the west. His example was a turkish student that studied over here and slept with is girlfriend but then got mummy to find him a nice turkish virgin to marry when he went home. That's the happy ending to this cultural oddity. The unhappy one is when the desire leads to self-loathing and guilt, and a spell in an old-school pakistani madrasa doesn't hurt here. The person ends up wanting to punish the society they percieve as having led them astray as well as destroy themselves.

The bomb makers are of course, a slightly different story, they are that hard-core of extremists that exist around any ideology, from my earlier socialist/communist example to facism, christianity or animal rights. I think these two ideas togher paint the best picture of the mental landscape of islamic extremism, particularly in the UK and essentailly, most of europe I've seen yet.