Professional terrorists

By H. D. S. Greenway

BOSTON: A chill went down the spine of the world when it was discovered that many of the bomb plotters who mercifully failed in the recent car bomb attempts in London and Glasgow were doctors. The basic tenet of the medical profession going back to the times of ancient Greece is "do no harm." One cannot but sympathize with Dr. Khaled Hamid in St. Louis when he said: "I felt sick. The idea that a physician would participate in that is incomprehensible to me. We're hurt as Muslims and as physicians who believe sacred life must be protected."

I also heard voices saying that this proves that poverty, repression, and lack of political and human rights has nothing to do with the making of a terrorist. These people were middle-class professionals, many of whom had met in Cambridge, England, living in a free and open society.

They were in no way poor, downtrodden, or politically repressed.

I believe this to be a basic misunderstanding of not only the rising phenomenon of Islamic extremism, but the very nature of political, social and revolutionary movements in general.

In any militant cause the leaders and activists are usually better educated and better off financially then the mass of people they claim to represent.

Revolutionaries like to call them the vanguard.

The famous British traitors of the Cold War, many of whom met at Cambridge University, joined the Communists not because they themselves were oppressed by capitalism. But they were deeply affected by what they saw as the great inequalities in Western democracies that the Great Depression of the 1930s intensified.

Many of the early leaders of Irish resistance to British rule were Protestants rather than part of the majority Catholic population. Why? Because Protestants were allowed more participation in British political professional life than were Catholics, and were therefore in a better position to effectively organize for the Irish cause. The early Bolsheviks were seldom from the peasant or worker classes.

Many terrorists, revolutionaries, and mass-movement leaders have been professionals. Mahatma Gandhi, although he dressed in peasant clothes, was a lawyer. Yasser Arafat was an engineer. Che Guevara was trained as a doctor.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's number two and said to be the brains behind Al Qaeda, is a doctor.

Bin Laden himself was a successful businessman from a rich Saudi family.

When you are on the bottom rung of society you are not in a position to do much more than survive. But if you are educated and able to look around, you can relate to the poverty and oppression of your particular group, even if you are not yourself poor and oppressed.

Most Muslims in Europe are as horrified and disturbed by terrorism as the Christian majority.

But many, even those born in Europe, find themselves in a half and half world where they are no longer Asians, Middle Easterners, or North Africans, but not quite accepted as Frenchmen, Germans, or British. Many Muslims in Western Europe live in comparative poverty to the general population, and unemployment is widespread.

The more education young Muslims get the more they begin to notice that all is not well in the greater Muslim world. They see that many of their coreligionists in Europe are on the lowest economic levels, and every time they turn on a television set Muslims in Muslim lands somewhere are getting hammered.

A Muslim community leader in Manchester, England, once told me that if you turn on the evening news a bit late, it sometimes takes a moment to figure out whether smoke, and flames, and gunfire on the screen are in Lebanon, Gaza, Afghanistan, Somalia or Iraq. He said this had a big effect on the Muslim young.

And then there is the Internet. Experts on terrorism say that you cannot overestimate the power of the Internet to inflame the passions of Muslim youth. With a computer you can connect with all the injustices of the Muslim world, a once great society that lies fallow in poverty, political oppression, and foreign occupation.

Whereas fiery imams used to be the most feared recruiting tool for violence, the Internet has now taken over the leading role in incitement.

A tiny minority turns to extremism, and today's young terrorists are self-starting.

So although potential terrorists may not themselves be poor or oppressed, poverty in the economic, social and political sense is a great motivator for terrorism. Not even doctors are immune from that virus.

H. D. S. Greenway's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.