“Terrorism as Veiled Suicide: A Comparative Analysis”

In the early twentieth century Russian revolutionaries carried out suicidal assaults and validated them by anarchist and radical socialist rhetoric as fervently as jihadists today employ the idiom of Islamism. When death-seeking became a fashionable sociocultural trend in Russia, political subversives embraced terrorism as camouflaged suicide. For their part, Islamists uphold self-inflicted death by constructing environments in which martyrdom carries greater value than life. Headhunters recruit perpetrators of self-destructive attacks among those who covet death and link it to faith – socialist or jihadist. Rather than taking their own lives, the believers opt for publicly commended acts of suicide terrorism.