Three is a trend.
Not to make too much of a small data sample, but I couldn’t help thinking about this guy today when I read about these two guys:
An Iraqi junior doctor and a brilliant neurologist working for the NHS are among the suspects being quizzed over the series of bomb attacks across Britain, it emerged today.
Details of the suspects were revealed as police staged a controlled explosion at a hospital near Glasgow today.
The junior doctor has been named as Bilal Abdulla, who is said to have completed his medical training in Baghdad.
The suspected ringleader of the Al Qaeda car bombers is a brilliant neurologist working for the NHS…
And -
One of the two men who drove a blazing Jeep Cherokee into the terminal building at Glasgow airport on Saturday afternoon is also thought to be a doctor. It is believed he worked at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, four miles away.
Reports have also said that doctors’ accommodations at the hospital are being searched.
We can over-generalize – heavens knows that certain German doctors in World War II crossed stark lines between legitimate research and human depravity. But still it surprises a bit, doesn’t it, to see doctors turn into enthusiastic mass muderers – how does one make that transition? Even as we find it grimly amusing to see the pet theories of “root cause” apologists so thoroughly exploded. At the top, and even at the execution level, these are educated men fomenting and committing these atrocities.
It’s perilous to psychoanalyze, but it strikes me that something interesting is going on here. Bright male children are being sent forth for their professional edcation by middle and upperclass parents and, thus armed with a scientific education somehow turn themselves into murderous fantasists.
Some friction must exist, some nexus between an enlightment-inspired realization of scientific knowledge on the one hand, and deep identification with the conflicting requirements of an all-encompassing faith on the other certainly, but something else besides: Some event or concatenation of events engenders a sense of communal affliction or nurtured grievance – the flip side of a perceived entitlement bordering on narcissism – which in turn presents in a reactionary turn to bloody mysticism. In religious doctors.
What’s up with that?
Arrogance, Lex, I think. Arrogance that we are unworthy of life. Arrogance that they have the right to take our lives away from us. Arrogance that they are superior to the rest of us in all ways.
If these doctors were educated in western schools, then they have doubtlessly absorbed the inherent anti-American, anti Enlightenment, and anti-Western civilization attitudes of higher education elites.
They are arrogant and, of course, above man’s laws.
Gives new meaning to “The Doctors Plot”. Evil is a mental and spiritual illness. These guys are missing something, aren’t they. Wonder if they took a hypocratic oath? In any case, bomb building aint brain surgery, and they couldn’t even do that. Maybe there IS an upside to socialized medicine.
Yon has a powerfully disturbing post today. Takes a while to load, wait for the captions.
I suspect they, like many in our own academia, have been educated beyond their intelligence. There is an old military adage: “You can’t fix stupid.”
This actually has a lot of history — the jihadis have always drawn quite a few of their doctrinal thinkers, their leaders, etc., from the ranks of the Western-educated, right back to Sayyid Qutb, who played a major role in turning the Muslim Brotherhood towards terrorism back in the 1950s-1960s.
Qutb was educated right here in the US of A, back in the 1940s, and a lot of his writing is, well, clearly borrowed from Communist thinkers (even to a college junior, which is what I was when I took that class). Substitute “glorious martyrs” for “vanguard of the revolution,” and “glorious state in accordance with Sharia” for “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and you have basically the same ideology, right down to the discussion of the bourgeois and the dialectic.
There is definitely something about the modern college experience in the West that is … well, not nearly as good at assimilating people as we might hope.
May I add, I feel this goes well beyond what is learned at home or in a school, but, rather, what is fed to boys and young men by fanatical Imams in the mosques. It’s already here (U.S. and Canada), as is evidenced by the spread of “Islamberg’s” across the U.S. and it’s not young men from disenfrannchised backgrounds who are listening to the Imams and answering the call to fanaticism and carrying out, or attempting to carry out, such plots. Such times call for a leader like Tony Blair, but from what I’ve heard so far from Prime Minister Brown I’m not impressed. Let’s all hope that he’s a more capable leader than what we saw from his message to the British.
Veritas et Fidelis Semper
Up to three doctors now. Ain’t no coincidence, Lex. Must be something in the water.
Like P3W, I think it’s a profound arrogance, but it’s also something more. I think by and large it’s limited to Muslim males. The women over there don’t have the right to choose whether or not to be involved in this kind of stuff from what I understand. So, I think the women who get involved in this are forced into it for the most part.
The males though… look at how they treat women there. If that’s not arrogance, then what is?
It’s also the religion. If you look at the writings of Mohammed and the way they are interpreted by most of Islamic society (wittnessed by the fact that there are few moderates who condemn terrorism), you’ll see that we are fighting far more than “a few fanatics”. This is going to be a long and ugly war. I’m afraid that Iraq and Afghanistan are just two of many fronts we will have to fight on before this is all over.
Jim C
Don’t let the MD fool you. The profession has its share of fools and liars just as any other. Many have been more sheltered from the realities of life more than most of you. Factor in deferential treatment, and rarely being told no, and you can wind up with very dogmatic, arrogant people. I would think them just as easy a target for indoctrination as any other class of folk. Even more so if they have to work in the British health care system.
By the way, neurologists are not brain surgeons, and most I know would have a hard time assembling a child’s bicycle on the weekend, let alone a car bomb. Setting one’s self on fire does not lead me to believe that the person in question is in fact a genius.
Why is it no one wishes to recognize demonic posession?
Hehe..#9…cause it’s more comfortable to blame parents, environment, chemicals & the new math…
Jim C, don’t write the women out of it. On the surface they appear helpless victims, but on closer examination one finds they are their own worst enemies, and as much a part of the problem as the men, even if they don’t self-detonate as often. All those male muj first learned jihad on their mother’s breast.