[lit-ideas] Re: Who actually did invent the suicide bomber?

  • From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 02:44:56 -0800 (PST)


--- Austin Meredith <Kouroo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 
> >This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group
> >that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil
> >regions of the country. They invented the famous
> >suicide vest for their suicide assassination of
> Rajiv
> >Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea
> of
> >the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers.
> 
> This would amount to a claim that the Tamil Tigers
> invented the suicide 
> bomber in the late 20th Century. Such a claim would
> involve the assertion 
> that there was no such thing before the late 20th
> Century.

*The above says that the Tamil invented the sucide
vest, not the suicide bombing. As for suicide bombing,
i.e. detonating a bomb and dying in the explosion, I
doubt that it needed to be invented. I know of an
example of suicide bombing from the Turkish siege of
Siget in the 16. century, where a janissary blew up
himself and one of the Austrian defence towers. (This,
though, was not the standard Ottoman practice.)

One earlier example of a suicide attack (before
explosives existed) is Milosh Obilic, a Serb nobleman,
who killed Sultan Murad I after the battle of Kosovo
in 1389., surely knowing full well that he would be
killed later.

The 9/11 style of suicide attack, i.e. using a plane
as a bomb, is of course very similar to Japanese
camikaze tactics.

O.K.


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