Dying to Win - Incredibly Informational Lecture on Suicide Terrorism

Now, before I start, I'm just going to state that this is my first thread on ATS, and I hope it is helpful to at least some of the community.I thought I had found this set of videos from ATS, but a search showed no threads linking to the videos. If there is such a thread, allow me to apologize.

Some background on the lecture, this man Robert Pape, a professor of Political Science and director of the Program for International Politics at The University of Chicago, has compiled an incredible amount of information on every suicide terrorist attack report he could get his hands on. So incredible, if fact, that no other person or even Government had such a data bank.

In processing and organizing this data, he discovered a very interesting trend on when and why suicide terrorism occurs. He discovered the main cause of suicide terrorism is not religious extremism or hating a certain group of people, but an occupation of their land. He does a much better way of explaining than I could ever do, so I will leave that to him. Although long, it is well worth the watch. It is broken into 4 parts, each about 15 minutes long.

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:



Part 4:

reply to post by superstatue


Good post, I had never thought of it in that way but it's clear to me its a battle of resources fought in the name of differences. Related is Palestine is still the issue by John Pilger, notice the similarities to apartheid South Africa, it reminds me of Mars Attacks, why can't we all get along?

SF

This is a rather skewed treatment of the subject - that pointedly ignores what Islam teaches about martyrdom, which I am guessing is the whole reason for this contrived study - so that it can be used to pressure US policy makers.

Abstract In “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Robert Pape (2003) presents an analysis of his suicide terrorism data. He uses the data to draw inferences about how territorial occupation and religious extremism affect the decision of terrorist groups to use suicide tactics.

We show that the data are incapable of supporting Pape's conclusions because he “samples on the dependent variable.”—The data only contain cases in which suicide terror is used. We construct bounds (Manski, 1995) on the quantities relevant to Pape's hypotheses and show exactly how little can be learned about the relevant statistical associations from the data produced by Pape's research design.

journals.cambridge.org...