Max Sawicky is linked over on the left, and I read his blog regularly. He currently has been mirroring Tim Blair’s “critique a day” of Fisk with his own of Instapundit, which I’ve found pretty amusing. Up until Friday.
Friday’s post triggered a response, because in part here Max and I part company pretty dramatically in our interpretation of what’s going on in the Middle East, and, by implication, what should go on.

First I have to say a few things before I get to the thing I can’t say. The bombings create awful tragedies. I’m agin’ ’em. As a recent statement by Edward Said confirms, they have greatly harmed the cause of Palestinian self-determination.

But other than instrumentally, they’re OK, Max? Is that really what you want to say here? They create tragedies, but if they worked, if they got the Palestinians their state, they’d be fine?

I wish the Palestinians had launched a Gandhi movement. If they had, no doubt the IDF would have started shooting them down and blowing them up, as it has for the past 65 years. In any case, under this scenario I believe that by now there would be an authentic Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza. Imagine if half the Palestinian lives sacrificed thus far had been martyred in the context of non-violent resistance. (But have you ever wondered why nobody ever says, “I wish Israel would embark upon the path of non-violent resistance?” Never mind.)

The Israelis might have started by shooting, but British, who were easily more bloody-minded as the Israelis, lasted maybe what … ten years? … in the face of Gandhi’s movement? The Israelis, with their progressive politics, dependent on the goodwill and funds of Europe and the US, would have folded like wet matzoh if confronted with a coordinated, genuinely nonviolent nationalist Palestinian movement.
And the Israeli’s have tried nonviolent means in the past. An Israeli PM was assassinated for moving the country toward peace, while political figures in Palestine are assassinated for proposing peace.

Now the part I can’t say. The point of all this, getting back to IP, is that the Times article gives no hint of the bombers being either psychotic or a ‘cult.’ To the contrary, the dilemma reported is that the bombers seem to fit no profile that would facilitate their neutralization. Apparently, anyone could be a bomber, and this is said, understandably, to have the Israeli government perturbed.

Actually, Max, it’s funny. I grew up in California in the late 60’s and 70’s, and saw the heyday of the cults here. My second wife was aggressively recruited by a cult, and I had friends who fell into cults from EST to Lifespring and others. So my antennae are fairly cult-sensitive, and as I read the article about the failed murder bombers, my immediate thought was “Wow! They’re being processed like new cult members!” Quick decision, isolation, and…boom! From the Times article:

’ A chain of events was dragging her down with a speed that left her frozen, unthinking.
It was only five days before that she had offered her services and maybe her life to a member of a violent Palestinian group in Bethlehem. It was only the day before, she recalled, that her offer had been suddenly, even greedily, accepted.
It was only on this day, Wednesday, May 22, that she had been pulled away from a marketing lecture at Bethlehem University, shown the backpack and how to trigger the bomb inside, put in a beat-up car with another would-be killer, and sent on, dressed to pass as an Israeli woman.

From an article in Ha’aretz, about a meeting between the Israeli Defense Minister and the failed murder-bombers:

Ben-Eliezer: ‘You have parents, brothers, sisters, family, friends. Did you think about them?’
Stiti: ‘Yes.’
Ben-Eliezer: ‘Did they know?’
Stiti: ‘Yes. My parents begged me not to do it. My father told me that I’d be very sorry if I dared to go ahead, but it didn’t convince me. What they told me at the mosque was more powerful. They told me to just think about the commandment and the reward, up above, in Paradise, with the virgins that would be waiting for me and all the honor I would receive.’
…