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This article, though somewhat old, has not been posted here at FR, and it bears on current events of course.

And it's spin on the current tactics by Palis I've not seen before. I suppose it merits a mild 'barf' alert, but it's not technically Pali propaganda, so I didn't label it as such.

This article may also partially explain the new trend of some media outlets labeling Pali suicide bombers 'homicide bombers'.

I have done my own homework in the past about American Indian tribes ... and indeed, moral systems for some are directly connected to landmarks. Displace the tribe, remove the landmarks from view ... and bang, moral system collapse, followed by tribal-wide mayhem.

During an auto tour out West, I did a 'string of pearls' series of visits to all the Indian Reservations on the way ... starting in the upper midwest (Winnebago), the high country (Blackfoot), then upper pacific. The gov't public housing buildings in these places strikingly match the buildings in the black projects on the other side of my town. (I was young during that trip ... and yes, it was despressing).

So, there is a partial ring to truth here for me, but perhaps I'm missing something.

Masada comes to mind as well.

If these linkages are utterly out to lunch ... so be it. But, I'm interested in Freeper thoughts on this line of thinking nonetheless.

I think this has about 10% of the truth. There's a big difference between suicide and suicide/murder.

It's commonplace to say that part of the problem is that the Arabs have no hope. They blame their problems on others and refuse to take responsibility for themselves.

But it wouldn't be working out the way it is, if not for a confluence of other things. One is western totalitarian ideologies: Fascism and Communism. Arab nationalism has a strong element of both these vicious ideologies. A second, of course, is Islam. Islam has a streak of cruelty, it has a strong insistence that people have no free wills, and it encourages people to kill for Allah.

Dying languages are preserved by the only Christian endeavor in the world that is widely recognized as the best in the world at what it does -- field linguistics. Some missionary endeavors (see the book Brutchka) integrate the Christian gospel into tribal life in such a way as to preserve aboriginal peoples. Then, there are the bungles. The tribe that discovered that antibiotics did not come "from Jesus" but from pharmaceutical warehouses now is the main source of that nation's prostitutes, for example.

"A tribe of 5,000 is threatening to commit mass suicide by leaping from a cliff unless Occidental Petroleum abandons plans to drill for oil in what the tribesmen claim is their territory.

When they do this Occidental will have access to all their land. If I was not a Christian, and was Occidental's president, I'd be taunting them daily

I understand that the Israelites had a crack suicide team during the Roman occupation. (Or maybe that was just Monty Python?)