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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation.
A handmade list of neighborhood victims (deaths) from the First and Second Intifada. Created by the family of Wafa Idris, in Amri Camp, courtesy Nichole Argo.
I first met Nichole Argo and Omar Amanat at a private dinner organized to introduce Argo’s groundbreaking study on human bombs to a small group of influential philanthropists. I was there as a guest of a guest. What Argo proposed held us spellbound. Her then-boyfriend had emigrated to Israel. He was in a café on his cell phone with her when a bomb exploded. Then another bomb went off. Argo decided then and there to discover why human beings would detonate themselves in order to kill others.
A Ph.D. candidate at MIT’s Center for International Studies, Argo was well equipped for the task. Long interested in ethnic mobilization and violence, Argo has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Rwanda. After her own personal crisis she spent two years in Israel and the Palestinian Territories as a researcher for Stanford’s Preventive Defense Project, interviewing families and friends of suicide bombers as well as preempted bombers in prison. The results of her investigation have been published as “Human Bombs: Rethinking Religion and Terror” as part of MIT’s Audit of the Conventional Wisdom series. It will in due time become a book.
Because of Omar Amanat’s incisive queries at the dinner that night, I thought that he was a member of a think tank. I would subsequently discover that, after almost losing his own life as well as that of his entire staff at the World Trade Center on 9/11, he had become his own think tank. Argo and Amanat’s discussion below adds much to the analysis of why people become human bombs, how Americans think about them, and how they think about us.
—BETSY SUSSLER
