sansouci, one must of course remember that religious terrorism is far from exclusively a Moslem practice. Recall how Catholic terrorists in Northern Ireland have murdered pregant women ?
They also tried to kill me when I was 5.
if you look at the life expectancy of people like army officers in WWI or bomber rear gunners in WWII these people were effecively committing suicide, it merely took a few goes to die.
The job my mum did in WWII, had a higher death rate than any Briitsh army unit.
The Kamikaze Japanese were sort of religious, since classical Japanese culture blurs the line between divinity and the state.
Ironically, Hitler threw a fit at the notion of his pilots being used like this, calling it "un-German". Draw whatever conclusion you like from that.
We do know that some Allied fighter pilots in WWII, rammed enemy planes, dying in the process, and in all wars there are men who do things like throw themselves on hand grenades to stop their mates getting killed.
Fact is that in wars, you stand a high chance of really bad things happening to you. All soliders are to some extent suidice fighters. All that varies are the odds.
Contrary to what Guardian readers would have you believe, efficient armies don't run on hate and violence. You need the squaddies to work with each other, and if necessary die for their friends, else your army simply does not work.
That's why Moslem armies are so shit. Typically formed from conscripts who hate the current regime, led by officers who unlike leaders of armies in civilised countries, tend to stay safe and let the junior ranks get slaughtered.
Not restricted of course to Moslems, in the Falklands, the almost uniformly Catholic officer class, ran away leaving untrained teenage farm boys to face Gurkhas. Real hard men, who have killed in face to face combat fear Gurkhhas.
Suicide bombing is thus based upon the failure of the military aspect of Moslem cultures.
Whatever you think of what we do in Iraq, or Israel is doing in Lebanon, the deeper point is that we do this because we can, and that for every one of our people who die, something like 50-100 Moslems die.
It is of course valid to not be very proud of the fact that we are much better at killing people that Moslems, but it is the way things are.