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Originally posted by analog
Sure it did, we just didn't hear about it like we get to now. News coverage is an amazing thing in these days. The ability to create homemade explosives has been around for a good while.
I'd like to see some actual facts to back this up.
Martyrdom itself has been around since our earliest points in history, and if they couldn't make backpacks to blow themselves up, they would just kill people by hand, knowing it would result in their own death.
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It's a relatively new phenomenon. From the Atlantic:
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Before 1983 there were few suicide bombings. The Koran forbids the taking of one's own life, and this prohibition was still generally observed. But when the United States stationed Marines in Beirut, the leaders of the Islamic resistance movement Hizbollah began to discuss turning to this ultimate terrorist weapon. Religious authorities in Iran gave it their blessing, and a wave of suicide bombings began, starting with the attacks that killed about sixty U.S. embassy workers in April of 1983 and about 240 people in the Marine compound at the airport in October. The bombings proved so successful at driving the United States and, later, Israel out of Lebanon that most lingering religious concerns were set aside.
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So, uh, thanks Reagan!
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