Not all Islamic terrorists are suicide bombers
Reader comment on item: The Only Commonality is Mass Killing

Submitted by Abigail, Sep 24, 2013 12:44

Though the impulse behind this piece is admirable, the argument remains deeply flawed. Alexis, after all, was not a bomber. To compare him to suicide bombers would indeed be ridiculous. But not every terrorist works with bombs - as the Tsarnaev brothers , Mohammed Bouyeri, and Nidal Malik Hasan, among others, have proved. Nor do the parents of every Muslim terrorist take pride, as so many Palestinian parents of suicide bombers do, in their child's "martyrdom." Moreover, mass killers in the West who happen to be radical Muslims DO on occasion act without orders from a larger group: they pick their own targets, their own methods. Alexis, in other words, may not have been a Muslim terrorist, but nothing about what he did that day -- or how he did it -- would have told you that.

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