Better educated suicide bombers carry out deadlier bombings

And you thought the Palestinian educational system was useless.

The most spectacular and technically difficult Palestinian suicide bomb attacks are being assigned to older and better educated bombers because they are more likely to succeed, a new study shows…

RAND economist Claude Berrebi, co-author of the report, said the findings show how intricate a suicide bomb attack really is. “The bomber has to decide in an instant whether to blow themselves up, to hide or to continue to a better target or to abort. There is a lot in trying to hide themselves in the local population without being detected. There is a lot to it, much more than a bystander would think,” Berrebi said…

Younger and less educated bombers were more likely to detonate too early, get caught by authorities or decide not to go through with the mission.

That bold part is intriguing insofar as it suggests a correlation between education and radicalism. I doubt that’s true, though; in all likelihood, education acts as a filter to weed out all but the most fanatic jihadis. If they’re still willing to throw it all away after having obtained an advanced degree, you know they’re committed. Beyond that, I doubt education per se has much to do with this except as a rough metric for native intelligence. But then, we are talking about the Palestinians here. If there’s no masters program yet for bombmaking at Gaza U, just give it time.

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