I don’t understand the mentality of the people of Tibet. Much of the population lives in poverty, and they have been victims of a cultural genocide over the past 50 years, while millions of Chinese have been moved into their country, which is under Chinese control.

This has forcibly and completely altered the demographics, according to Tibet.com. But for some odd, strange reason, the Tibetans don’t go about blowing themselves up. They don’t find crowded discos or schools and explode. They’re oppressed, they’re desperate, yet there are no Tibetan suicide bombers. They must not realize that blowing oneself up to kill civilians is a way of defending themselves because they sure are in a desperate terrible situation.

Another interesting group of people are the Kurds. Their nation of Kurdistan is occupied by several different nations and no world power seems to care about them. For 70 years, the Kurds’ existence has been denied and their language, identity and culture banned in several nations that make up parts of Kurdistan, according to the BBC.

This has involved into rural depopulation and destruction of Kurdish villages and their traditional society. In fact, Turkey’s human rights minister acknowledged that in the past two years, the army has evacuated and destroyed at least 1,390 Kurdish villages. This has resulted in some two million Kurds being displaced, a dozen towns depopulated and also five to six million Kurds forced into western Turkey because of Turkeys actions. Just two weeks ago, Syria sent troops to massacre dozens of Kurds.

So how many suicide bombings have the Kurds been responsible for? Not one. Sure, they’re pissed off and they have a right to, but for some reason, they haven’t figured out that the best way to deal with their problems is to blow themselves up in crowded university cafeterias and buses full of school children and commuters.

Another strange situation is that of Biafra. The Igbo-Biafrans declared independence in the late 1960s, only wanting to live in peace with their neighbors. Nigeria proceeded to invade the country, creating millions of refugees, killing tens upon tens of thousands of Igbo, and destroying their cities, according to biafra.info.

Biafra has been under Nigeria’s rule since, oppressing the native Igbo. They’ve suffered so much, yet I was unable to find any record of an Igbo blowing himself up, no record of an Igbo going into a crowded restaurant to see how many whole families he or she could wipe out. I mean, the Igbo have no other way to defend themselves, and they’re pretty desperate. Perhaps they don’t want independent that badly. Perhaps they are happy being ruled by Nigeria.

Then we get to the Palestinians. They’ve had over a hundred suicide bombings, killing almost 1,000 civilians, according to www.pmw.org.il. Unlike the Kurds, Tibetans and Igbo-Biafrans though, the Palestinians have been offered a state a few times over the past 50 years and have turned it down every time. They didn’t even start suicide bombings until Israel started negotiating with them in the 1990s, according to aish.com.

Now imagine that you find the most popular disco on the beach and you wait in line with other teenagers and people in their 20s to get inside. All of the sudden, you see a cute girl in a short skirt and a tight shirt that stops just above her navel. Suddenly, you see nothing but pain. You feel for your face, but all you can feel is shrapnel. You lie on the ground in pain, the bodies of everyone in front of you torn apart into tiny pieces of flesh spread across the pavement. A piece of an eye in one place; a piece of a tongue is somewhere else.

Thirty people are dead, hundreds maimed, and within minutes, the ambulances arrive and a special crew of volunteers called Zaka start scraping off flesh and skin from the pavement so that there will be something to bury. Paramedics take out the rusty nails, which were added to increase damage, that have been lodged into your body. A Palestinian suicide bombing has just taken place, one of 100 over the past three years that were supported by Arafat, according to haaretzdaily.com, and carried out by one of the many terrorist organizations in the West Bank.

You see, this happened because the Palestinians are desperate and this is their only means of defense. Sure, you could argue that Palestinian suicide bombers could go after Israeli army targets instead of civilians, or you could argue that they could curb terrorism and come back to the negotiating table with Israel, but do you have any idea how threatening a dancing teenager with her friends in an Israeli night club is?

Some people believe that Palestinian suicide bombings occur because of deeply rooted hate and brainwashing by Palestinian political and religious leaders. They say this is why Palestinian teenagers and kids, male and female, are constantly trying to kill as many civilians as possible.

Some people think that the problem is a deeply rooted hatred in the Palestinian culture that is being ignored. Some people think it is bloody acts of terror that are being accepted or brushed away, rather than being dealt with. A recent BBC article reports that seven out of 10 Palestinians still support suicide bombings.

The real question is though, why aren’t all those other unhappy people across the globe blowing themselves up?

Gilad Skolnick is a Collegian columnist.