PrintJuly 3, 2007
The doctors' plot
Many minds are reeling with revelation that seven doctors - people supposed to be dedicated to saving lives - have been detained as suspects in the UK terror bombing plots and attempt. How on earth could such people seek to use nails to maim and kill innocents?
Jack Risko of Dinocrat.com has the best explanation I have yet seen:
Mohammed Atta was an architect. These men are doctors. It has been said that architects and doctors arrogate to themselves some of the creative and life-giving attributes associated with God, which idolatry or human presumption is said to be a terrible sin in Islam, though there are of course many Muslim architects and doctors. Moreover, these professions have been important in creating the Modern World.There are men and women who can make an accommodation to life, and there are those individuals who are tortured by the contradictions between the real world and what they have been taught to believe as true. (Such men often burn with self-loathing; a "paradise" achieved by suicide, murder, and fire would appear to fit pretty well psychologically with their warped experience of the world.) It is therefore not at all surprising that men in such professions as architecture and medicine come to embody the existential crisis of Islam in the Modern World and wind up choosing the evil path. Tragic, but not surprising. [emphasis added]
Jack, a brilliant man, has been way ahead of the pack in identifying the inner tensions of Islamic society, which is nearly sterile in terms of its ability to generate innovation and other aspects of modernity, but which lives in a world rapidly changing as technological development accelerates. I suspect that the stresses he identifies are all but unbearable for those who harbor both scientific learning and deep Muslim faith.
Meanwhile, my friend Larwyn writes me insightfully about the underlying strategy in using doctors as the agents of terror. Nothing could be better calculated to aggravate ethnic tensions in Western societies hosting Muslim professionals. Who, she writes, is going to be in a hurry to keep that appointment with Dr. Hamid? By sowing such suspicions, the Islamists make life difficult for the peaceful Muslims, and hope to drive them to radical Islam, exploiting the very tensions Jack describes.
These people may be dysfunctional, but they are not stupid.
