Terror management dynamics equally drive Muslim hostility toward the West
Evidence
Polls told a chilling story of increasing hostility toward the West: almost a third of those polled in Turkey, half in Pakistan, and three quarters in Morocco and Jordan said that suicide bombings against Israelis, Americans, and Europeans in Iraq were justified. Many Muslim children yearned to become martyrs (shahid). At the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, an eight-year-old boy showed a reporter “a portrait his family had taken of him clutching an AK-47 rifle…and said that his older brother was a shahid—then he hung his head and admitted that no, his brother is alive and never did anything so grand.” At the Jenin camp in the West Bank, a thirteen-year-old girl said that although her father wanted her to become a doctor, “she would prefer to study nuclear physics so she could blow up America.” — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 528