In his latest work, Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It, University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape holds that occupation, not religion, is the prime factor in suicide bombings.
According to Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Pape is scheming secretly with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a suspected front for the brutal terrorist organization Hamas, to augment sales of his new book. The plan involves a stealth agreement by CAIR to have its chapters around the country purchase copies in bulk to propel sales up the bestseller ranks.
CAIR praises the book as “a powerful educational tool to be used in challenging Islamophobia that is based on the false linkage between Islam and suicide terrorism.”
But Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, characterized the Pape/CAIR transaction as “underhanded” and particularly shameful because it involves a professor at a major university surreptitiously collaborating with a Hamas front group.
Addressing the substance of Pape’s thesis, Houriya Ahmed, a research fellow at London’s Centre for Social Cohesion, commented that suicide terrorists may justify their actions both for religious reasons and opposition to the presence of Western troops in, notably, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Such people/groups operate through a religious prism — a political ideology that they see as religious and which dictates their worldview as well as their actions,” she stated. “In this sense, Islamism — which they see as “true” Islam — serves as their main ideological force.”
Pape is one more prominent example of an academic dead set on denial of reality, and he provides the Islamists with cover for their violence by so narrowly identifying the full range of their motives.