Terrorist organizations have been able to market mass murder under hysteria’s banner of alleged martyrdom. However, when it comes to understanding Islamic suicide terrorism in particular, there is much more to it than martyrdom. In this groundbreaking book, Nancy Kobrin dismantles the psychological dynamics of suicide terrorism to help the reader gain a new perspective on one of the most destructive forces the world has witnessed to date. Dr. Kobrin is the first to connect the dots between the tragic role forced upon the devalued female in Arab Muslim and Non-Arab Muslim "shame/honor cultures" who grow up under a death threat, and how their child rearing practices further compound childhood development. Islamic suicide terrorism reveals graphic unconscious dissociated behavior which the terrorists create at the crime scene of the suicide bombing.

The mother-child relationship is central to understanding Islamic suicide terrorism. The Banality of Suicide Terrorism exposes the very ordinariness of one of the deepest yet most poorly understood causes of the suicide bomber’s motivation: a profound terror of abandonment that is rooted in the mother-child relationship, a kind of traumatic bonding and disorganized attachment. According to Kobrin, this terror is so great in the would-be suicide terrorist that he or she must commit suicide (and mass murder in the process), in order to fend off that terror of dependency and abandonment. Suicide terrorists seek a return to the bond with the mother of early childhood— known as maternal fusion—by means of a “death fusion” with their enemies, who subconsciously represent the loved (and hated) maternal figure. The terrorist’s political struggle merely serves as cover for this emotionally terrifying inner turmoil, which can lead down the path of ultimate destruction.

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