Oprah goes dhimmi

With a little help from the notorious dhimmi academic John Esposito. "Rescuing the World's Girls, Part Five," from O, the Oprah Magazine, with thanks to a tea-loving snail:

In the 1980s, when suicide bombings first made headlines, psychologists tended to label the perpetrators as mentally unstable religious fanatics. But today scholars agree that most are otherwise ordinary people whose ready passions and chronic disappointments make them easy recruits for larger political powers. "What people miss is the fact that religion is not the cause; it's the context," says Georgetown University professor of Islamic studies John L. Esposito, PhD, author of Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam. Esposito offers another explanation--though not a justification--for what motivates bombers. "These are people who define their situation as hopeless. They feel that they have no way to respond against what they see as Israeli military aggression. They say, 'They have weapons on that side, and [we have] none on our side.' So they turn themselves into weapons."

Esposito here echoes an argument made by Zarqawi and many others. Neither Esposito nor Zarqawi mention why it is so easy for them to obtain bombs with which they kill themselves and others, if it is so hard for them to get weapons. Also, Esposito unsurprisingly doesn't tell Oprah that Muslim clerics and political leaders encourage suicide attacks.