So use JIHADD brand Semtex Explosive to show you really care!!!
Money back guarantee if not completely satisfied... or if he lives. 
I think that it has to do with the extremism that has moved to the forefront - and how that has changed definitions. where committing suicide in the quiet of your room may be a dishonorable thing, carrying out a homicide bombing isn't a suicide, so much as it may be considered dying while attacking the kfir.
Read your Koran.
Also look up the Hashishin, aka the Assassins. It's where we get the name. And, don't forget to read up on the celebrations of the martyr Hussein.
They are actually Homicide Bombers...
The Islamacist clerics have justified suicide attacks by putting the emphasis on the attack, rather than on the act of the suicide.
They compare it to a man waging an impossible fight and dying in the process.
In their mind is is similar to a man facing overwhelming odds, rushing into battle and dying while striking out at the infidel.
Anybody with a modicum of common sense can see the difference between their justification of suicide bombing and a suicidal mission. In a suicide bombing a terrorist dies by their own hand. In a suicidal mission, one dies at the hands of the enemy.
The clerics have equated the two kinds of attacks. It doesn't make any sense, but enough Muslims have bought the justification.
The same reason that Jonestown happened. A nut speaks, koolaid is consumed.
Fighting for one's beliefs and dying for a noble cause.
Of course the Islamofascist application is totally wrong and perverse.
I can't remember the source, but I was told that it was Arafat who populized this terrorist 'technique'.
I don't know from where his justification, but he spread the idea through the schools from the youngest ages, and romanticised the concept.
Example:
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=reform&ID=SP96805
"The Sharia rulings that forbid harming civilians remained valid [for centuries] until Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi and a group of ulama created a dangerous breach with regard to Jihad. This was when, out of support for Hamas, he ruled that suicide operations among civilians were legitimate. He said: This is one of the glorious types of Jihad, and it is a kind of terror that is legitimate according to Shari'a. He claimed that [in Israel] there is no difference between a civilian and a soldier – because the children of today are the fighters of tomorrow, and they are all occupiers.
"He [applied] this same fatwa to [suicide] operations in Iraq, saying that there was no difference between the [American] civilian and a member of the American military – because the civilian is serving the soldier. Then he applied this to all civilians, Muslims and non-Muslims, [in Iraq], who are connected to the occupation forces, by ruling that the sentence of anyone who collaborates with the occupier is the same as the sentence of the occupier himself. This is the same basis of jurisprudence one on which [Abu Mus'ab] Al-Zarqawi, [Abu Muhammad] Al-Maqdisi, [3] Abu Qatada, [4] and Sheikh Hamed Al-'Ali [5] rely…
"This fatal breach has created an ideological and moral crisis in Islam – as [former editor of the Saudi daily Al-Watan Jamal] Khashoggi said [in a July 19, 2005 article in the UAE daily Al-Itihad ]– and it has caused much damage to Islam and the Muslims. The moral deterioration has reached the point that they blow up children in Baghdad and peaceful civilians on buses in London. These fatwa s are a moral and ideological mark of shame, which we must purge from our Islam…"
["it seems that prior to the mid-1970s at least....."]
Well, your timing is about right. But, I would consider your question more generally, More specifically, I think the consequences of the actions of the Arab terrorists at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich was a major paradigm shift in the thinking of these fanatics. In short, they realized that terrorism could work (T.V. network coverage, etc.)
Money back guarantee if not completely satisfied... or if he lives.
I don't think they consider it suicide. It has always been desirable to die gloriously in battle in any culture. This is an extension of this. Remember this is an attack, not a suicide.
Think of the marine who jumps on the grenade to save his fellow marines. Would anyone consider that a mortal sin because it is suicide? I don't think so.
The short answer is that it isn't suicide when you kill non Muslims by exploding yourself and a bomb. It's called martyrdom. These psychos are revered by the ummah as martyrs. Islamic scholars also call them martyrs
A Muslim commits suicide when kills just himself. This is forbidden always.
The more innocents you kill the better in these idiots eyes.
Understanding Islamic terrorism is an exercise in futility. Who cares? The clerics and leaders who train the homicide/suicide bombers and send them on their missions are cowards, and the 72 virgins these pathetic lemmings are told they will get in "paradise" are horny homosexual males. We're the good guys, and in spite of Cindy Sheehan and the democrat left wanting us to lose to these monsters doesn't change the fact that we need to kick their collective butts. I don't want to understand these people. There's nothing to understand. No cause could be noble that advocates killing innocent and unarmed civilians and not worthy of my time or one single brain cell investing to understand them. Period.
IslamOnline.net: "Ask The Scholar"
http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?cid=1118742803355&pagename=IslamOnline-English-Ask_Scholar/Page/FatwaCounselE
I think the phase irrational fanaticism goes a long way toward explaining it.
MEMRI.org - Special Dispatch Series - No. 909: "BAHRAINI AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST: THE PROPONENTS OF THE SUICIDE IDEOLOGY HAVE TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS" (ARTICLE SNIPPET: "In an article that appeared in the Saudi daily Al-Yawm, titled "The Globalization of Islamic Suicide" author and journalist Sawsan Al-Sha'er wrote that the extremist Islamist groups are taking advantage of global communications to recruit suicide bombers, and predicted the spread of the suicide bomber phenomenon to Britain as well.") (May 17, 2005)
MEMRI.org - MIDDLE EAST MEDIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE Special Report - No.32: "MEMRI TV Project Special Report: Arab and Iranian TV Clips in Support of Suicide Bombing" (September 1, 2004)
JIHAD WATCH.org (HAARETZ): "10 SUICIDE BOMBINGS FOILED OVER PASSOVER HOLIDAY" (ARTICLE SNIPPET: "One of two Tanzim activists caught at the end of March told interrogators the group that sent them had planned a series of other attacks, including one with a device to which blood infected with AIDS would be attached.") (April 13, 2004)
What happened is that the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhoods became all-pervasive in the Arab world. One of the intellectual 'lights' of the Muslim Brotherhoods was Sayyed Qutb, who imbibed a great deal of existentialist philosophy, along with a vicious anti-Westernism in the French mould, during a sojourn in the West (including the U.S. where he found 1950's rock-and-roll degenerate).
Qutb fused the existentialist version of 'absolute commitment' as the source of meaning in an absurd world with the classical Islamic understanding of marytrdom (which included death in battle against 'infidels') and argued that the 'absolute commitment' of a suicide attack was a form of absolute islam (submission) to Allah, and thus a form of martyrdom rather than of suicide, which was classically considered haram (forbidden) by Muslims on the
basis of a few Koranic verses.
Incidentally, a Syrian cleric, usually considered a fundamentalist radical, just yesterday or today issued a fatwa upholding the classical understanding and considering suicide attacks as suicide rather than martyrdom-seeking.
(Finally, let's have none of the idiotic 'homicide bomber' nonsense around here: except for ETA which always phones in evacuation notices before blowing Spanish buildings, all bombers are intent on homicide, so adding
'homicide' is vacant of meaning. The distinctively obnoxious feature of the neo-Islamic practice is the use
of youths as guidance systems for bombs, a practice which shows not the extension of conflict from military means to murder, but utter contempt for human life, even one's own and that of one's faithful followers. "Suicide bomber" is the correct name.)