Official: Female suicide bomber kills 3 at checkpoint

Official: Female suicide bomber kills 3 at checkpoint

Posted by rbenmoshe on Sun, 04/27/2008 - 20:12 in

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/04/27/iraq.main/index.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A female suicide car bomber attacked an Iraqi security forces' checkpoint in eastern Baghdad on Sunday, killing three people, military officials said.


art.iraq.baghdad.afp.gi.jpg

A boy walks past a burning vehicle destroyed during Sunday's clashes in Sadr City.

The bombing came as fighting in the capital's Sadr City neighborhood killed at least seven Shiite militants.

The suicide bomber detonated her taxi near Shaab stadium in a mostly Shiite area of eastern Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said.

An Iraqi soldier and a traffic police officer were among the fatalities. Fourteen others were wounded in the blast, the official said.

In western Baghdad, a roadside bomb exploded Sunday morning, killing one Iraqi soldier and wounding six people, including soldiers and bystanders, the official said.

The soldiers were on foot patrol in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Mansour at the time of the blast.

In other incidents, eight people were killed and 44 others were wounded Saturday night and Sunday morning in Sadr City, the Interior Ministry official said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military said it killed seven "special group extremists" in Sadr City during that time.

All but one of the alleged extremists were targeted by airstrikes

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I just had an idea. I think that rather than looking at female suicide bombers as some anomaly in the masculine monopolized art of terrorism, we could use the examples of female suicide bombers to counter the argument  by Miller and Kanazawa that the reward of "70 virgins" is a major motivating factor in compelling Islamic men to perform acts of terrorism-suicide, the polygamy being what  "makes men violent" (look at Joanna's note on "Why Women Aren't Funny"). This is because I can't imagine why female suicide bombers would ever be interested in virginal males (rumor has it that they aren't very good in the sack).

what is especially interesting about Miller and Kanazawa's argument is that it supports monogomy over polygamy by linking monogomy to democracy and economic development, and seems to imply that western morales are objectively superior to eastern/Muslim ones.

Miller and Kanazawa write:

"By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region."

However, if we just took a little glimpse at the VERY monogamous world of Medieval Chirstianity, we'd see that there was no democracy and a terribly unequal distribution of wealth. Today we like to call it "feudalism." concerning violence, the Ottoman empire may have been famed for their use of crucifixion, by it appears that Medieval Europe readily eclipsed the Islamic world in the art of torture. Don't believe me? look up some articles on the Walachian Vlad III aka "The Impaler." Further, if we were to comparethe economies of any kingdom in the monogamous Christian west to 11th century Islamic Andalusia and Egypt, or 16th century Ottoman empire, we'd find the "polygamous" economies were doing exponentially better than the monogamous ones.

further, there were no suicide bombers. then again, there were no bombs. 

Oh wait, there were things that go "kaboom."  in the end of the 17th century, the monogamous venetians, during a battle with the polygamous Ottoman Empire, had no problem firing at a gunpowder-filled Parthenon, the 5th century BC temple built for the goddess Athena. could this be viewed as an act of terrorism? maybe not at the time, but so long as we're on the subject of blowing up ancient stuff, lets not forget about the little tiff the western world (and japan too) made about the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas of Bamyam in 2001.