As I said before, the AP cranes it's neck to explain how the latest UK terrorists are a diverse group, as if they hadn't one thing in common that drove them to jihad. Irshad Manji cuts through the political correctness like a hot knife through butter.
THIS week's arrest of Mohamed Haneef in Brisbane may be more curious for the fact he's a professional lifesaver than for the possibility that he's a terrorist. So far, most of those being investigated in the latest British car bomb plots are, as is Haneef, doctors. The seeming paradox of the privileged seeking to avenge humiliation has many scratching their heads. Aren't Muslim martyrs supposed to be poor, dispossessed and resentful?
September 11 should have stripped us of that breezy simplification. The 19 hijackers came from means. Mohammed Atta, their ringleader, earned an engineering degree. He then moved to the West, opting for postgraduate studies in Germany. No aggrieved goatherder, that one.
In 2003, I interviewed Mohammad al-Hindi, the political leader of Islamic Jihad in Gaza.
A physician himself, al-Hindi explained the difference between suicide and martyrdom. "Suicide is done out of despair," the good doctor diagnosed. "But most of our martyrs today were very successful in their earthly lives."
In short, it's not what the material world fails to deliver that drives suicide bombers. It's something else. Time and again, that something else has been articulated by the people committing these acts: their religion. Read more.
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