This is common knowlege Bob. That I have to provide links for you puzzles me. But I find it odd that you ask for substantiation when you provide none yourself, other than crime statistics. Furthermore, you started this whole social context canard before you even knew who the bombers were.

But I would suggest that if what your saying is true, then we would see this sort of behavior across all cultural boundries: Hindus, Sihks, Africans, but we don’t. The fundamental motivating factor here is Islam. Looking for tangental causes is futile.

And what was the point of mentioning Kamikaze’s and Jim Jones?

Here’s your citations, of many that are available by googling.

One:
“Among Hamas and PIJ members, Berrebi found, only 20 percent were poor - fewer than the 32 percent who qualified as poor among a similar slice of the general Palestinian population between ages 18 and 41. But among suicide bombers, the contrast was even more pronounced: Just 13 percent were from poor families.

Educational backgrounds of people aligned with those groups showed similar results. Among suicide bombers, 36 percent had finished at least secondary school. Only 2 percent had not gone past primary school. It looked as if the pundits might be wrong: The suicide terrorists were fairly well educated and were far from being poor.”

Two:

“Noting these patterns, at least a few observers have drawn the correct conclusion. The outspoken Algerian secularist, Sa?d Sadi, flatly rejects the thesis that poverty spurs militant Islam: “I do not adhere to this view that it is widespread unemployment and poverty which produce terrorism.” Likewise, Amayreh finds that militant Islam “is not a product or by-product of poverty.”

Three:

“But the evidence reveals that the relationship between poverty and religiously motivated violence is weak. Radicals and revolutionaries historically have emerged from the middle to upper classes of society.”

Four:

“But a careful review of the evidence provides little reason for optimism that a reduction in poverty or an increase in educational attainment would, by themselves, meaningfully reduce international terrorism. Any connection between poverty, education, and terrorism is indirect, complicated, and probably quite weak.”

Five:

The Deep Intellectual Roots of Islamic Terror

Six:

“Today, though, suicide bombers are middle-aged and young, married and unmarried, and some of them have children. Some of them, too, are women, and word has it that even children are being trained for martyrdom. “There is no clear profile anymore?not for terrorists and especially not for suicide bombers,” an exasperated senior officer in the Israel Defense Forces told me last year.”

It is the manifesting their religious convictions part I do not agree with.

Part of what I write about the London suicide-bombers is supported by what we hear about the Dutch van Gogh-murderer. He most certainly was a suicide-type as well. Not only did he make his detailed testament shortly before his act: he got into a gunfight with the police to get killed.
Take note: he let his lawyer tell that he did not want any defense. His lawyer remained silent. He remained silent himself as well except for a few minutes at the end. In this minutes he directly addressed the police-officers who themselves testified they were not sure he was trying to kill them telling: I did try to kill you, but I am a poor shooter.
So in effect we have a suicide bomber still alive here.

There was one moment before were he mumbled some words looking up *religiously* and saying some lines that could be understood that for himself he is still busy convincing himself that this murder was what allah had told him.

I go further. Although I am atheistic myself your suggestion that these madmen “express religious convictions” this way is insultive to people with a religion.

(An amazing and instructive discussion related to this one I had before at the site Risq with a guy named Peter Waterman: here)

Any citation to substantiate the claim that suicide bombers appropriately represent the whole social spectrum?

Brian Walden, in a BBCR4 talk last Thursday, commented that there is nothing especially novel about suicide bombing. Russian Nihilists used it as an effective method of assassination in the 19th century - for example, in the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, despite the fact that he had liberated the serfs - and before the US liberated slaves.

In WW2, with the Kamikaze planes, it was used by the Japanese as an effective way of accurately bombing warships of the US fleet in the Pacific theatre.

To suggest that we shouldn’t look into the social and political factors which make suicide bombing a credible attack option, and an apparently honourable one, seems both dogmatic and absurd to me. Shortly after 9-11, I suggested that al-Qaeda is best considered as an example of a cult, successful in its own terms, and that we might sensibly recognise cults are capable of exercising a powerful influence on their followers. An outstanding instance of just that, completely unrelated to al-Qaeda, is what happened with the Peoples Temple in Guyana in 1978:

“In 1978, 913 followers of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple committed a mass suicide in northern Guyana at a site called, Jonestown. The charismatic leader of Jonestown, was Jim Jones, a preacher who set up the Peoples Temple in San Francisco and ultimately moved his followers to a more clandestine site in Guyana. While Jones was preaching in San Francisco, he helped out many local and even national campaigns and was seen as a healer which much power in the community.”
http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~reli291/Jonestown/Jonestown.html

Understanding the rationales of the motivating religion or ideology is only one aspect: we also need to understand the social influences which motivate people to come to espouse that religion or ideology.

Seems to me that recent crime trends in Yorkshire are certainly a relevant factor in considering the social context which resulted in four young men becoming members of a cult that promoted suicide bombing:

- There were significant regional variations in the number of sex offenders as a proportion of the population. The lowest was in Hertfordshire with 27 for every 100,000 in the population, while the highest was in West Yorkshire with 67.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3931791.stm

- Yorkshire and Humber’s average of recorded crime is 137 per 1,000 population, Yorkshire and Humber rates 2nd highest with London being the highest with 145 per 1,000 population of recorded crime.

- Yorkshire and Humber has the highest recorded burglary rate of the 9 regions, with 24 per 1000 compared to the England and Wales average of 16 per 1000 population.

- Yorkshire and Humber has the 3rd highest count of recorded violent crime with 21 per 1,000 population, this is the same as the England and Wales average at 21 per 1,000 population.
http://www.yorkshirefutures.com/cb.aspx?page=974DDEFC-A3E8-468C-BC9E-48745584A230

“Our violent crime figures rose by 49.6 per in 2004/05 and the first few months of this financial year show a rise of 97 per cent on this time last year. However, this increase now appears to be slowing down, indicating that our tighter application of national recording standards has had a significant effect on the rise in violent crime figures.”
http://www.southyorks.police.uk/news/details.php?id=1243

On that official evidence, it seems likely that violent crime is coming to be regarded as the norm in Yorkshire. Cheating is verging on respectable which is how a prioner’s official record in Wakefield prison came to be fraudulently changed retrospectively and why a prison officer who reported that offence was bullied and ostracized by her colleagues - Wakefield prison is only a few miles south of the Leeds suburbs where the bombers lived.

For all that: “the UK has one of the lowest murder rates amongst the European Union, with London being below average for EU capital cities”
http://www.gos.gov.uk/goyh/149232/149234/?a=42496

It’s also immensely convenient to wrap up suicide bombings as the act of the socially oppressed.

But I think you’ve answered your own question. If you want to know the religious motivations of an individual, you should study their religion, no?

Suicide bombers/killers cross all social strata. They are rich, poor, educated, and ignorant. That in and of itself should dismiss the ’social trauma’ theory Bob wants to push. As the facts come out about these killers, I suspect you won’t hear a word about prison abuse or racism, but many words directly quoted from the Koran/hadith.

“The eminent paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow has been found guilty by the General Medical Council of giving ‘erroneous’ and ‘misleading’ evidence at the trial of a woman accused of killing her two sons. The GMC found that Prof Meadow, 72, failed in his duty as an expert witness to explain the limited relevance of his findings in the case of solicitor Sally Clark who was found guilty of murdering her babies. The paediatrician, from Woodgate Lane, LEEDS . . . ”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1692576,00.html

So is this passage in the entry for “Yorkshire” in the edition of MS Encarta I have on my PC:

“An old slang expression, ‘to come Yorkshire on someone’, meaning to cheat that person, dates from the early 18th century and was used by Charles Dickens in his novel Nicholas Nickleby”

Old habits are hard to break.

Nor do I believe that an embedded history of animosity to London and S-E England in Yorkshire is totally irrelevant. It happens my family was living in Yorkshire just a few miles south of where the bombers were living but in October 1987, at the time of the great storm which swept across the south of England with hurricane force winds. At the time I was working in central London and commuting over weekends. What truly amazed me were unsolicited and completely unexpected expressions of glee over the storm damage I encountered in Yorkshire, usually to the effect that at last London and the S-E were getting their just deserts.

Much other evidence can be cited of this animosity and it therefore makes sense to probe into how far both these salient background factors contributed to a mindset among young Muslims living in Leeds suburbs in which suicide bombing in London came to be regarded as a heroic and sanctified endeavour.

In fact, the bombings were a PR disaster for the Jihadists. The Muslim community in Britain has loudly and clearly denounced the bombings as an evil act, which perhaps helps to explain why the press in Iran switched to editorialising that the bombings were the act of American or British forces committed to fabricating a justification for attacking Iran.

It is immensely convenient to wrap up suicide bombing as the act of the mentally ill. Granted that suicide bombing is not the act of a sane individual, the question remains as to why the bomber considers this the appropriate expression for manifesting their religious convictions.

I can’t imagine that would be a fruitful approach. Yes the mentally ill have existed forever. No they have not had an organization which was willing to fund and create bombs and direct them where to put them on a regular basis. Perhaps Al Qaeda uses the mentally ill (though I’m VERY loathe to just write off suicide bombers as merely mentally ill in some sort of brain damaged way, that is too dismissive of how religion can actually work) but that is very different from them merely inspiring the mentally ill.

They had to come from somewhere. If not from London itself, one incident is just one incident. That people don’t want to bomb their hometown is somewhat understandable, isn’t it?

Well Bob, you’re rather begging a question, which is whether or not there are similar groups in other areas.