My Life Is a Weapon

INTRODUCTION The Power of the Powerless, the Powerlessness of the Powerful 1 CHAPTER 1 The Original Assassins: A History of Faith and Power in the Islamic World 19 CHAPTER 2 A Key to Paradise around Their Necks: Iran's Suicide Battalions 33 CHAPTER 3 The Marketing Strategists of Martyrdom: Hezbollah in Lebanon 52 CHAPTER 4 Israel and Palestine: The Culture of Death 79 CHAPTER 5 Suicide or Martyrdom? Modern Islam and the Feud of the Fatwas 115 CHAPTER 6 Bushido Replaces Allahu akbar: The Japanese Kamikaze 130 CHAPTER 7 The Parasites of Anger: Al-Qaeda and the Islamist Internationale 139 CHAPTER 8 Separatist Movements and Female Suicide Bombers: The Cases of Sri Lanka and Kurdistan 155 CHAPTER 9 After Martyrdom: Recent Developments in Iran 167 Notes 181 Index 195

Christoph Reuter is a reporter and international correspondent for the German magazine "Stern".

"We are as yet a long way from fully understanding the various manifestations of suicide terrorism and its motives, but My Life Is a Weapon is an important contribution. Reuter has traveled for years through Arab countries, the Middle East and Central Asia and is able to talk more or less freely to people and read texts usually not accessible to the average foreign correspondent. His account of suicide terrorism is, to the best of my knowledge, the first (of its kind) in any language."--Walter Laqueur, Times Literary Supplement "Against the violent Manichean rhetoric of the times, and its brute interventionism, Reuter offers a counter-narrative: suicide attacks in Israel-Palestine will stop when Israel withdraws from the Occupied Territories; more generally across the region, the West should keep out."--Jacqueline Rose, London Review of Books "This is a journalist's history ... with solid exposition, sharp observations and flashes of insight... For instance, in invading and occupying Iraq, he maintains, the Bush administration is playing into the hands of terrorists like Osama bin Laden, creating exactly the context of humiliation that provides new recruits."--William S. Kowinski, San Francisco Chronicle "[A] well-researched history of suicide attacks, which touches on the 12th century Assassins but concentrates on today... Suicide attackers can be educated and uneducated; religious and secular; comfortably off and destitute: their link is the decision they make to transform their powerlessness into extraordinary power."--The Economist "Christoph Reuter ... interviewed as many families of suicide bombers as he could find, canvassed their countries of origin for insights, and has compiled the results in a short, readable book. The windows Mr. Reuter makes into suicide terrorists' family lives ... show how lamentable is the ethos of chauvinism and pride that supports suicide terrorism. But they also show how fragile and contrived that support can sometimes