And you thought campus recruiting here was bad.

Certain people go ballistic over military recruiters on American college campuses. They might make it into a near-earth orbit if an official outfit known as Martyrdom Seekers showed up on campus to hold an orientation on youth suicide to advance the foreign and policies of the Bush Administration.

Somehow we don't see Joe Schmidlap, even at Yale or Columbia, agonizing over attending this kind of "seminar." It would have to compete with, like, beer, women, The Man Show, and Chemistry homework. We figure hedonism, career ambition, common sense, and at the very minimum, simple collegiate inertia would make for poor attendance.

But, in Iran, this kind of thing is actually no big deal, as you can tell from the AP report below. Maybe they just left out the stuff about parents storming the administration building.

Usually suicide attacks come late in war, if the kamikaze attacks of WWII are any indication. Somehow, we doubt this rises much above a PR stunt. "Look at us, we're so stoked about this we'll actually strap Semtex to ourselves and . . . . No, really!"

It's just a little hard to believe that these young Iranians would blow themselves up for Ahmadinejad and Khameini. These are people we wouldn't classify right off as particularly stable or persuasive. Why would any students want to turn themselves into a red mist for the Iranian equivalent of Jimmy Carter with attitude?

Mohammad Ali Samadi, spokesman for Esteshadion, or Martyrdom Seekers, boasted of having hundreds of potential bombers in his talk at a seminar on suicide-bombings tactics at Tehran's Khajeh Nasir University.

"With more than 1,000 trained martyrdom-seekers, we are ready to attack the American and British sensitive points if they attack Iran's nuclear facilities," Samadi said.

"If they strike, we have a lot of volunteers. Their (U.S. and British) sensitive places are quiet close to Iranian borders," Samadi said.

Samadi reviewed the history of suicide bombing as a weapon, praising it as the most effective Palestinian tactic in their confrontation with Israel.

The organizers showed video clips of suicide attacks against Israelis, including one in the Morag settlement near Rafah in Gaza strip in February 2005. One settler, three Israeli soldiers and the two attackers were killed in the attack. [two Jews for each bomber. Hmmm.]

Hasan Abbasi, a university instructor and former member of the elite Revolutionary Guards, told the audience of about 200 that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons as claimed by the United States and some of its allies.

"Our martyrdom-seekers are our nuclear weapons," said Abbasi, the event's main speaker.

After his speech, about 50 students filled out membership applications.

"This is a unique opportunity for me to die for God, next to my brothers in Palestine. That was why I signed up," said Reza Haghshenas, a 22-year-old electrical engineering student.

A 23-year-old woman student, Maryam Amereh, said: "We are trying to defend Islam. It's a way to draw the attention of others to our activities."

But Rahim Hasanlu, a 22-year-old industrial management student, declared himself not interested in joining.

"I just attended to learn what they're saying, thats all." [Finally, someone with a lick of sense.

We wonder. Could such a seminar be approved on one of today's Ivy League universities, say, if it were packaged as something like "Alternative Approaches to Conflict Resolution in the Fourth World"?

We rather like our concept of the "Fourth World" and maybe it will prove to be a useful concept to get us away from the "all Muslims hate infidels" or "Islam means . . . ." Instead, we might have "Muslims who reside in the Fourth World . . . ."

In the Third World people suffer from a lack of economic, educational, financial, and honest government resources. In the Fourth World, they suffer from a lack of spiritual resources, a lack of appreciation of other people as being human to be persuaded or left alone, an inability to distinguish between an ability to kill and plunder and an ability to create, and an inability to live without blaming someone else.

Maybe we'll work on this some.

"Suicide Bombers Warn U.S., U.K. of Attacks." By Nasser Karimi, Associated Press, 2/19/06 (emphasis added).