Suicide Bomber or Homicide Bomber?

[Alec]

Which term do you think is more appropriate, "suicide bomber" or "homicide bomber"?

[Alec]

I was looking at www.foxnews.com and noticed a story about a "homicide bomber." I thought that was interesting and wondered what other sites called the same thing. I went to www.nytimes.com, and they called the same incident a "suicide bomber."

Then I went to http://news.google.com and did searches on the two different terms in quotes. Basically, only Fox News or Fox affiliates called them homicide bombers, and almost everyone else called them suicide bombers.

I was kind of wondering why Fox decided to split with the rest. I guess the focus of the crime should be all the people who were killed, not the fact that the murderer killed himself at the same time. "Homicide bomber" doesn't really communicate that he killed himself too. On the other hand, I guess you could say that "suicide bomber" doesn't really communicate that he killed anyone other than himself.

The only reason I can think that you wouldn't want to call it a "suicide bombing" is that it glorifies the radical islamic idea that you get a free ticket to paradise for dying while killing infidels, while otherwise it sounds like you were just a murderer.

[theyeti]

Huh...neat. I'm not sure which is more appropriate. Google gave me 52 results for homicide and 7420 for suicide, so it must not be catching on just yet. "Homicide bomber" does seem to make more sense though. I bet it's the radicals in the middle east that came up with the term "suicide bomber" in the first place, then we just adopted it.