TWENTY-FIVE years ago today,
Immediately after the bombing, a group called Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility, but in 2003, a district-court judge in Washington, hearing a lawsuit for damages from the survivors, found that Hezbollah--financed by senior Iranian government officials--was behind the blast.
The destruction of the Beirut embassy was followed just six months later by the twin bombings--just 20 seconds apart--of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks and the building that housed the French peacekeeping force in Beirut. More than 400 people died. Similar incidents followed, including the 1998 car-bomb attacks by al-Qaida on the U.S. Embassies in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya; the 2002 truck bombing of the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan; and the most horrific suicide bombings of all--the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
What would prompt a person to become a walking bomb? An MSNBC interview with a source in Hamas, a Palestinian terror organization, yielded this quote: "The bombers believe they are sent on their missions by God, and by the time they're ready to be strapped with explosives, say the sources, they have reached a hypnotic state. Their rationale: that by blowing themselves up in a crowd of Israelis, they are forging their own gateway to Heaven."
Many Muslims decry suicide bombings, citing a Quranic prohibition against killing oneself, and dispute the claim that suicides achieve martyrdom. Still, it has become a preferred technique of many Islamist groups, some of which have used women, young children, animals, and even retarded people as their bomb-conveyers.
On Wednesday, a suicide bomber killed at least 50 people at the funeral of two anti-al-Qaida Sunni Iraqis. What began in Beirut continues today--a perversion of religion and a desecration of human life.