It’s Those Seventy Chippendale Dancers That Await in Hell

Iraq

            

Driven or exploited? Depending on which story you hear, failed Iraqi suicide bomber Sajida Rishawi is either a pawn of a patriarchal society or a criminal who conned herself into a corner as tight as the corset of explosives she failed to detonate. Books that belabor the “Three P’s”—patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness—to varying degrees abound. There’s Christoph Reuter’s My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, Barbara Victor’s Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers, and Jessica Stern’s Terror in the Name of God, and more. It’s a growth industry. Murray N. Rothbard got it right in “Hutus vs. Tutsis: “In dealing with crime, he wrote, “liberals are concentrating on the wrong root causes. That is, on ‘poverty’ or ‘child abuse’ instead of a rotten immoral character.