> So you're saying that there are motivations that would make you perform suicide bombings? There are incentives by which you would sacrifice your children? <...> If you think that the death of your child will send him on a fast track to heaven that can seriously impact the rational choices you make down the line.
If your people were under threat, would you sacrifice yourself to save them? If your children died fighting to protect your country (genuinely protect, not in the "US invades Iraq to protect our god-given right to drive giant trucks" sense), would you be proud of them? Do you think they'd go to heaven?
This is why I keep pressing on this: under what circumstances would you do the same things that they're doing? Start from the premise that you did, and work backwards - what would it take? Why would you do that? If you continue to act like these people are weird alterna-humans, you're going to keep getting surprised by their actions. Start from the premise that they're like you or broadly like the people you know, work your way back to why the hell they're doing the things that keep surprising you, and then figure out what's going to make them stop.
(As a separate note, the concept of martyrdom doesn't start in Islam - there's a rich history of it across all the Abrahamic religions, and all of them presume the martyr's getting the fast track to paradise.)
I'd say one other thing, which is that Hamas is a militant group which considers themselves under existential siege and behaves accordingly - Iran is a different entity under different constraints whose people (and leaders) make different choices. Words are words - I'd suspect we've both heard plenty of revolting things from our countrymen that we brush off as idle talk that the other side would take as a dire threat.
And, for what it's worth, I understand the paranoia. I don't think it's unjustified. I get why Israel does not want Iran to get a nuclear bomb. But I don't think the actions of Israel or the US here are making that outcome less likely, and I think they're taking those actions due to the kind of misreading of Iran that we're discussing here.
To flip this on its head: if you were Iran, what on earth would convince you not to build a bomb now?
