Nathalie Bennett of Philobiblon posted a review of a book called “Female Suicide Bombers” by Rosemarie Skaine, at Blogcritics. Below is an excerpt:
…An attack now has to have some special feature : like the bomb being in the attacker’s shoes : to get it into the headlines, rather than just drifting around in the news wraps. There’s a logic to that, for one database, quoted in Rosemarie Skaine’s Female Suicide Bombers records that there was an average of three such attacks per year in the 1980s, ten a year in the 1990s, 40 each in 2001 and 2002 and almost 50 in 2003.
One thing that will, however, help an attack hit the headlines is if the suicide bomber is female. That’s still seen as shocking, surprising. Which is odd, really, since I learnt from Skaine’s book that the suicide belt – that bomb image with which we’ve all become so familiar, was invented for women attackers, by the Tamil Tigers in Sir Lanka. What’s relatively unusual there is that the women aren’t just used as suicide attackers, but also soldiers. Women’s units have been used in battle since 1984 and the first female commander was appointed in 1990. That’s in contrast with the groups from Islamic societies, where women are, other than suicide attacks, generally kept out of the active fighting.
Yet interesting Skaine reports on a Islamic website, named Al-Khansaa, after a female poet contemporary with Muhammad, that praised suicide bombing as a way to female liberation. And she reports an account that Yasser Arafat was responsible for coining the term shahida – “previous to his speech [in January 2002], there was no feminized version of the masculine form of the Arab word for martyr.”
Overall, the best statistics available suggest, Skaine reports, about 15 per cent of suicide bombers have been female. Given the gender frameworks of the societies from which they come, that’s perhaps a surprising figure, and she reports the many explanations that have been used for their participation.
It seems the general Israeli security view is that the female attackers are marginalised individuals, left with no place in their own societies, perhaps feeling the need to atone for some “deviant” behaviour. Yet that would seem to be contradicted by the first Palestinian suicide bomber, Reem al-Rayishi, a young mother in her early 20s who left behind two young children.
Another view is that they are driven by extreme anger, by the damage done to them and their loved ones. Seemingly supporting this case is the Tamil Tiger Thenmuli Rajaratnam, known as Dhanu, who killed Rajiv Gandhi. Four of her brothers were killed in the conflict, her home was looted and she was gang-raped. Similar stories accompany many of the Chechen “black widow” attackers.
Some present the women as victims themselves, duped, drugged or browbeaten into the act. The Chechen Zarema Muzhikhoyeva would seem to support that case. Widowed, deprived of custody of her daughter, she was known as “a person easily persuaded”, had taken a loan from her controllers, and seems to have been broadly mentally unstable, a state amplified by the use of drugs by her controllers. She, however, did not go through with the attack, acting suspiciously to ensure that she would be stopped and the bomb defused.
A related view to that is that the women are brainwashed by extreme religious fundamentalism. Yet that view is apparently counteracted by the rapid spread of the use of the tactic, involving at least half a dozen women, in Iraq, a country in which Islamic fundamentalism is foreign.
Women attackers might even see their actions as overtly feminist: Skaine quotes Yoram Schweitzer, who suggests these attacks might open “a Pandora’s Box of demands by women for rights and freedoms currently denied Them”. Denied other opportunities to fight, women might see this as their only option. …
