"If you imagine that you can buy immunity from fanatics by curling yourself in a ball, apologising to the world for who you are and what you stand for and what you believe in, not only is that morally bankrupt but it’s also ineffective because fanatics despise a lot of things and the thing they despise most is weakness and timidity,"

This is HoWARd’s statement, but is it based on evidence or is it empty rhetoric?

Professor Robert Pape from the University of Chicago is the author of a new book, Dying to Win. This book provides the first data-based analysis of suicide bombers.

"From Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas on the West Bank to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, every group mounting a suicide campaign over the past two decades has had as a major objective – or as its central objective – coercing a foreign state that has military forces in what the terrorists see as their homeland to take those forces out. The presumed connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading and may be encouraging domestic and foreign policies likely to worsen America’s situation and to harm many Muslims needlessly."-Robert Pape

Then we find this data.

"The most important admission of the Department of Defense report is that historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States."

Former president Jimmy Carter, some years after he left the White House, was unambiguous in his concordance with the above and below sentiment

"We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers, women and children and farmers and housewives, in those villages around Beirut. As a result of that we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful."

Scarily we see a high level of education and opportunity in almost half of the suicide bomber profiles.

"[…] operating on the blithe assumption that the suicide terrorists were all poor, young Islamic radicals. In fact, 42% have post-secondary educations, and they’re part of concerted campaigns with coherent goals." – Robert Pape

Nowhere is there evidence that states that we (the west) are targeted because we are weak and timid.
If this were the case then homeless shelters and women’s refuges would also be targeted.

I’m not with HoWARd or Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said –

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."

HoWARd – redundant rhetoric from a redundant time.