The Inventor Of Suicide Bombers

Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hizbollah, is believed to have issued the fatwa that encouraged suicide terrorists to detonate truck bombs outside the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. But as David Ignatius points out, he was among the first Muslim clerics to condemn the 9/11 attacks and he described Osama bin Laden as “profiteering” from misery in the Muslim world. The column by Ignatius provides an interesting look into the divisions within the ranks of Islamic radicals; these days Fadlallah’s attention is focused not on attacking the U.S. but on “this bizarre situation called Israel.”

Author: Peter Maass

I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.