Whether 9/11, 7/7 or more recent bombing campaigns that have hit the Western world and which are blamed on Islamic terrorists are precisely that or are instead false flag operations, it is a fact that suicide bombers exist: from the Japanese pilots in World War II, to suicide bombers in Palestine and Iraq, the last few decades has seen a dramatic increase in such "suicide bombers". The question everyone ponders, but no-one seems able to answer, is: what to do with it? One possible answer may be a totally unexpected one: study what happens when dying.

From 1980 to 2003, suicide attacks amounted to only 3% of all terrorist attacks but accounted for 48% of total deaths due to terrorism - this excluding 9/11 attacks. It is a lesson for terrorists that to achieve impact, they will have to be willing to give their own life. In late June 2007, the UK was once again hit by a spate of "suicide bombers" that were labelled as "bringing Iraq to Britain". Despite the best efforts of the media and the government, these "suicide campaigns" were anything but that what has been witnessed in Iraq, or previous terrorist campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s, which were often directed against the Prime Minister directly.
The current "threat" consists of a handful of fanatics armed with little more than petrol and caravan gas canisters, without even the basic common sense to avoid parking their "bomb" in a tow-way zone. They are not even terribly good: of eleven attacks in the UK that we know about since 7/7, only one has succeeded and this latest effort must be marked down as "almost a farce", as it was so amateur. Indeed, not a single individual, apart from the driver himself, was injured; no-one died. Compare this to the carnage in the streets of Baghdad, in which up to a hundred people can die in a single suicide bomb attack, and it is clear Baghdad is not yet in the streets of Britain.

"Islam fundamentalism" is blamed for the spate of bombings. Fine; but what is the solution to this problem? Muslim leaders are at pains to explain, and apart from condemn the actions, are ill-equipped to deal with the situation. The reason why, may come as a surprise: because suicidal Muslims is not typically Muslim; if anything, Muslim fundamentalists have finally followed a trend that has been developing for several decades elsewhere - and can be found in all religions. As such, Muslims leaders have had little time to come to terms with the situation, as well as having to deal with a situation that is totally alien to them - and is considered by the media to be one of the major problems of our time. Did anyone interview with Pope after the mass suicide of a Christian cult in Uganda, in which one thousand people died? No.

But rather than argue that they are "Islam fundamentalists", if these people were Christian, we would speak of a sect or a cult. And that is largely what 7/7 was: a copy of the Japanese Ohm sect's attack on the Tokyo underground. But on 7/7, no-one headlined that "Tokyo had come to Britain".
The very term "Islam fundamentalism" also implies that somehow these people follow Islam to the letter of the law, whereas the vast majority of Muslims are more relaxed. That is simply not the case. It is the suicide bomber cult that has perverted the meaning of the Koran to find a religious pretext for their activities.
The "loophole" is to see the suicide bomber as a martyr - a concept that is found both in Christianity and Islam. The difference between a martyr and a suicide is thin and Christian scholars have debated the issue for a very long time. Richard Marius's biography of Thomas More indicated that More felt hesitant about accepting martyrdom too easily, stating it was very similar to suicide - something that is spoken against as one of the greatest sins for most religions. "True martyrdom", as it was defined, was a person who lost one's life, passively, at the hands of non-believers because of one's religious beliefs or practices. We are far removed from the definition of a suicide bomber.
As mentioned, the Roman Catholic Church considers life to be a gift whose sole "owner" is God, who is consequently the only authority that may legitimately decide when to interrupt it. Special cases exist, such as the giving of one's own life to save that of another, but most cultures do not consider such acts to be true suicides.
It may thus come as a surprise to some that Islam has the harshest view of suicide of any major religion. It is why some of the lowest suicide rates are found in Muslim nations like Jordan or Egypt. "Islamic fundamentalists" - cult leaders - meanwhile argue that a martyr goes directly to Heaven, and have to declare a Holy War to even find some provision for making these claims. As such, a suicide was often seen as an act that would result in punishment in the Afterlife, but by labelling it martyrdom, it has now been redefined as a blessing. It is, unfortunately, institutionalised religion itself, and specifically the Catholic Church as they largely instigated this trend, which is to blame for creating the status of "the religious martyr" in the first place.

That Islam is now seeing an increase in "suicide bombers" - martyrs - is not due to the radicalisation of Islam; it has two causes: the creation of Islamic cults, as well as the use of this terrorist technique for political goals.
Cults kill - and fortunately they often kill themselves. Though question marks remain over the true nature of the suicides of the Order of the Solar Temple (in which the majority of the bodies were found to have been shot) and Waco's Branch Davidians, there are clear examples of mass suicides: Heaven's Gate is one of them. Each of these follows a clear pattern: separation from the family, separation from every day life, specifically targeting impressionable young men and women, and redefining their life's mission are key ingredients of any cult. It is also a charge levied against several Christian communities, primarily Opus Dei. Unremarkably, it is precisely what was found to be the case with those blamed for 7/7: like the victims of Christian cults, the family of these Muslim young men had no idea what their children were involved with; during the June 2007 London and Glasgow terror campaigns, an Indian man told his parents he was going abroad, including London, for a "top secret series of lectures on global warming" - a week later, his parents learned he was one of the arrested individuals.

Religious cults kill, largely self-imploding; the other motive of such cultish behaviour and the cult of the suicide bomber is political. After the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II, the major attack of politically motivated suicide bombers occurred in 1983, with the truck bombing of two barracks buildings in Beirut that killed 300 and helped drive American and French Multinational Force troops from Lebanon. It is evidence that in some cases, politically motivated suicides work, and it is precisely why they continue.
As a consequence, hundreds of Muslims, primarily Palestinians and Saudi Arabians, specifically in the 1990s in Palestine, and in Iraq, since 2003, have died in the act of killing both military personnel and civilians in this fashion. In this case, the suicides bombings are carried out to achieve political change... and will only stop when a political change will come about. To stop this type of "terrorism", political leaders can - if they so desire - change the political situation. If they are unwilling to do so, they and their nations need to accept that such politically inspired suicide campaigns will continue; they should not mislabel it as "Islam fundamentalism", as religion does not enter into the equation, even if a part of the volunteers are recruited by means of religious propaganda.

To comprehend the complex situation that has developed gradually over the past decade, each attempt needs to be analysed for motive: whether it is simply cult behaviour, or politically motivated. Though often the motive will be a mixture of both, it is important to know what is driving this movement; labelling it Al Qaeda three seconds after a bomb failed to go off, does not help anyone, and is on par with arresting men like Lee Harvey Oswald just hours after the Kennedy assassination, to present the public with some type of closure. Being seen to act is not sufficient in an area where authorities should act appropriately.
There are clear indications that most of the terrorism is not cultish or religious, but politically motivated. Professor Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago writes: "Beneath the religious rhetoric with which [such terror] is perpetrated, it occurs largely in the service of secular aims. Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism." His research suggests that foreign occupation is the principal factor motivating suicide attackers. "Though it speaks of Americans as infidels, Al Qaeda is less concerned with converting us to Islam than removing us from Arab and Muslim lands," Pape says. Those politicians, who want their country to have a presence in the Middle East, tend to play down this conclusion, instead opting to blame religious fundamentalism.

There are other aspects that require further attention. The common reaction to a suicide bomber is to assume that he or she was motivated by despair, and probably came from a poor, neglected segment of society. Both President George W. Bush, Cherie Blair and the Dalai Lama have made this claim. For Bush, it seems, bringing "democracy" and a Western type of government to "these people" will resolve their despair - and resolve the problem.
However, anthropologist Scott Atran found in a 2003 study that this is not a justifiable conclusion. Some suicide bombers are educated, with college or university experience, and come from middle class homes. Most suicide bombers do not show signs of psychopathology. Indeed, leaders of the groups who perpetrate these attacks search for individuals who can be trusted to carry out the mission; those with mental illnesses are not ideal candidates.
The "suicide attack" against Glasgow Airport of June 30, 2007, underlined that those involved were medically trained, including one doctor. The list of the victims of the Order of the Solar Temple shows ski champions and successful businessmen. None of them could be described as "desperate, poor people". Indeed, though controversy remains about what precisely happened, going on the official version of events, these people were not desperate; instead, they agreed on a common goal: to leave this world, to go onto what they considered to be a divine mission; to achieve this goal, they felt they had to die.

This is the core of the problem: the "need" these people feel to die to accomplish a goal and the belief that the suicide bomber is a martyr, not a suicide. At the core of this, is the debate over suicide. At the core of that, is the debate of death. At the core of that, is the debate of religion versus science. Religion - and government - has placed certain dogma and protocol on death.
Many see the problem of the suicide bomber as religion arguing that it is okay to kill other people, if the cause is just. Unfortunately, that is the case, on both sides of the date, with some of the worst transgressions seen by the Catholic Church, for example at the siege of Béziers, where it killed more than 12,000 people when they demanded for the arrest of 222 suspected Cathars.
Furthermore, in recent years, politics has once again become dominated by people who see themselves as people with a religious mission, rather than leaders of a democratic nation. This is true both for Western and Muslim leaders.

But this is not the heart of the problem. The core of the problem is that death remains largely a religious, rather than a scientific area of study. We do not know what happens on the threshold of death, and scientists are to blame for that. In a matter of speaking, by not tackling this problem, science has left religion to claim whatever it wants about death, a blank canvas it - but specifically cults - have used to tell people whatever they can be told; there is no opposing point of view that will initiate inner dialogue.
The greatest question - what happens when we die? - began to be asked in the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in study of Near-Death Experiences and like phenomena. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were at least some academic institutions that were studying NDEs, reincarnation, etc. Though the nature of such research can only be labelled basic, largely because of the tremendous opposition from some other scientists, resulting in a non-committing nature to assign major funding and scope to such studies.

Today, we find that most of these pioneering professors are dead (Bob Morris, John Mack, Ian Stevenson are just some of them). Guy Lionel Playfair in the May 2007 edition of Fortean Times found that most of the academic chairs established to study the paranormal are largely vacant, or instead taken up by sceptics. Whereas some may argue that such "ridiculous sciences" should never have been studied within the scientific walls of universities, it is a fact of life that more and more, universities are becoming religious institutions once again, and in certain corners, even creationism is picking up. If science was truly exploratory, it would try to explore the frontier of life, and try to see what lay beyond.
By surrendering the domain of death and once again making it the almost exclusive bailiwick of religion, claims about death and what comes after, are the key determinatives for terrorists or cult leaders to convince their followers to either commit suicide, for whatever purpose that leader is demanding that ultimate sacrifice for. No-one is, or can, challenge them.

Most religions, whether ancient or modern, condemn suicide; researchers of NDEs or reincarnation found some basis to argue that, indeed, a person committing suicide seemed singled-out for harsher treatment. Whether this was real, or purely the result of previous social conditioning of the mind, is again a question science should address, but its premature surrender has made no-one the wiser.
Bringing death and the afterlife within the bailiwick of science, does not seem to be something that will happen anytime soon. But it is clear that if a scientific exploration of the afterlife would be even attempted, religion would either loose out, or be vindicated on key concepts of its teachings. It is, however, not a risk religion, and by extension, society, seems willing to take. Instead, religion is abusing the Afterlife, spinning it for political impact, and Holy War. The first victim of this war, may not be Truth, but Knowledge and Death itself.