This study on terrorism will define the primarily secular motivations for suicide bombers and other terrorists to strategically oppose foreign occupation of their country in the data collected in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape. Traditionally, the use of terrorism has been propagandized by western nations as being primarily religious-based in terms of fundamentalist values. More so, the propaganda of Islamic terrorism has become a dominant theme of the United States and European nations to define the underlying forms of Islamic terrorism tin the modern War on Terror. However, Pape (2005) provides a database of different terrorists activities, …show more content…
In this context, Pape had graduate students with multiple cultural and racial backgrounds to count the number of religiously based terrorist acts based on suicide. Paper’s (2005) findings suggest that out of 315 terrorist bombings in the Middle East (over a period of 50 years) only 14 of these attacks had a religious motivation. This data defines the primarily secular motivations of the bombers, which define something other than religiosity as the cause of terrorist in this type of strategic action. By breaking down the religious motives through historical examples, such as the Jewish Zealots, it is important to understand the framework of religious fundamentalism as a perceived cause of terrorism. However, Pape (2005) soon dispels many of these notions by counting the different kinds of suicide bombings, as well as the motives for these actions in a secular and non-secular format. These are important aspects of Pape’s (2005) “database” that he had constructed as a way to