«Mike Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, put it bluntly: "Iraq is an almost unimaginable force multiplier for Bin Laden, al-Qaida and their allies," he told me.»Meanwhile...--"A reason to hate": What makes an al-Qaida suicide bomber?
«Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers?If occupation were enough, if being conquered by an outside power and being hauled off to jails and tortured were enough to so derange a society that it would form a death cult like we see brewing in the Muslim world, we should see Tibetan Buddhists blowing themselves up on Chinese busses, we should see Tibetan Buddhists thronging in the streets calling for the deaths of Chinese noncombatants.
We do not see this and we are profoundly unlikely to see it.
Tibetan Buddhists believe a lot of wacky things about the nature of the universe; they don't believe those wacky things that you have to believe to form a death cult.
(It's not that it's impossible that Buddhism could inform this kind of behavior. And actually, Zen Buddhism did to some significant degree inform the worldview of the Kamikaze pilots during WW2. It's interesting to note, just as a Buddhist scholar, that one of the things Zen can be criticized for is not really focussing on compassion to the degree that other schools of Buddhism do. There's this whole martial spirit of tons of martial metaphors in Zen Buddhism that lent themselves rather readily to Japanese nationalism.)
But there are differences among our religions... »
--Sam Harris- "The View from the End of the World" (a Long Now talk)
Life lesson learned elsewhere: causality is obscure.