By Jack Lee
Update: At least six doctors or medical students were among the eight under arrest last night over plots to bring death and carnage to London and Glasgow.
We tend to think of the of terrorists as some struggling young person, living on the edge society, poorly educated, unemployed, isolated from all the good things we take for granted; A desperate person carrying out a desperate act! Then you read about an Islamic terror plot to kill hundreds using car bombs in London and discover two of the plotters were medical doctors.
These (alleged) terrorists were well respected members of British society. One was from Iraq, the other from Jordan. They were well educated, worldly and able to enjoy and participate in every aspect of British society. So much for theory of poor and hopeless kid with a bomb strapped to his body. And if we could only reach out as a caring people, engage the fringe people, give them hope through a responsible, dialog, then soon we could hold hands and go skipping off into the sunset as we sing songs of love and peace.
Most of the 9/11 hijackers were not poor, uneducated people, they were ideologs and they were motivated by a cultural clash, not foreign policy, not ecomics and not about what the USA did or did not do somewhere to somebody. These people have been on a bloody rampage longer than the USA has existed. They are part of a culture of death.
Time and time again, the evidence points to a dysfunctional society that holds a vision of the future that is wholly incompatible with the idealisms commonly found in free and democratic nations. The Islamic culture denounces western society as evil and decadent and theirs as pure and superior. This is not a fundamental social division that can not be easily mediated away. What freedoms shall we surrender and what parts of the Koran shall they dismiss so we can all live peacefully together?
In 1997 interview with the Pope Benedict, just before he became the Pope, he addressed the polarizing differences between Islam and Western society when he said, “Islam has a total organization of life that is completely different from ours; it embraces simply everything,” he said. “There is a very marked subordination of woman to man; there is a very tightly knit criminal law, indeed, a law regulating all areas of life, that is opposed to our modern ideas about society. One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society.”
He went on to say, “An important point, however, is … that the interplay of society, politics and religion has a completely different structure in Islam as a whole. Today’s discussion in the West about the possibility of Islamic theological faculties, or about the idea of Islam as a legal entity, resupposes that all religions have basically the same structure, that they all fit into a democratic system with its regulations and the possibilities provided by these regulations. In itself, however, this necessarily contradicts the essence of Islam, which simply does not have the separation of the political and religious sphere, which Christianity has had from the beginning. The Quran is a total religious law, which regulates the whole of political and social life and insists that the whole order of life be Islamic….”
About four decades ago there was a scholarly article on world cultures and it analyzed 8 basic components identifiable within each culture. All the world cultures were essentially compatible, save for one. Need I say it?
The changes that are necessitated for resolution are therefore incumbent on that one society. They are relentlessly forcing change under penalty of death on all other societies to that we will yield to their vision. That is the brutal, ugly truth we are reminded of every time we see insane acts of mass violence against innocent men, women and children, in Madrid, London, New York or Washington DC, to name but a few.