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Old 11-22-2010, 12:02   #1
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The Educated Muslim Terrorist

Indications are that Kipling was right.

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The Educated Muslim Terrorist

Posted By Wm. B. Fankboner On January 20, 2010 @ 12:04 am In FrontPage | Comments Disabled

East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. ––Rudyard Kipling

Nidal Hasan, Abdulmutallab and Humam al-Balawi are jihadists who were educated and came from privileged middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Hasan was an American-trained U. S. Army doctor, Abdulmutallab was a London engineering student and the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker, and double-agent Dr. Humam al-Balawi was a member of the Jordanian professional class.

Many Westerners are confused by the willingness of university-educated middle-class Muslims to perpetrate barbarous acts of terrorism. It appears to be a reversal of the usual process: typically college students raised in religious households become more secularized by exposure to the humanities and sciences, and the rationalist values of the European Enlightenment. Yet when embryonic jihadists attend Western universities they graduate with their faith intact: 9/11 terrorists Mohammed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were both beneficiaries of Western university educations. These men, who sought to advance themselves with Western training and technical skills, ultimately turned against, and attempted to destroy, the very society that provided them with the means to that advancement. Instead of employing their newly acquired learning and knowledge to improve the lot of their fellow countrymen and co-religionists, they turned this very learning and knowledge against their Western benefactors...

...It is not clear if Toynbee’s insight (made in 1934 by the way) will be of any practical value in our current relations with Islam, but as Marshall McLuhan once remarked, “Nothing is inevitable so long as we are willing to contemplate what is happening.” Perpetual conflict with Islam is not inevitable if we are willing to apply sufficient intellectual candlepower to the problem; and it is possible that this window opened on the mind of Islam’s intelligentsia will pay dividends at some future time. America is a technological, military and political powerhouse that does not always know its own strength or understand the daunting effect this has on less fortunate nations. Or as Toynbee put it, “America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.”

On the other hand, intellectual objectivity and self-knowledge are not qualities one customarily associates with Islam. Maybe a recognition of its manifest inferiority complex and its pathological jealousy of the West will prompt militant Islam to question its dependence on blind, fanatical hatred as a substitute for reason. Perhaps the failed states of the Middle East will at long last accept the fact that their social ineptitude and political impotence are problems of their own making rather than the fault of Western colonialism. And perhaps the Muslim community at large can be persuaded that Islam’s enemies are not in Israel, Europe or America but within Islam’s own tent. That is a grand hope.

But is it a realistic one? What if Toynbee was telling us something entirely different? I.e. that Kipling was right? That the only place East and West are destined to meet is on the battlefield. What if the monumental misunderstanding that he and Kipling documented seventy-five years ago means the end of cooperative multilateralism and that we are in this fight alone, i.e. that we cannot rely on a rational response from an enlightened Moslem community. If so, we in the West should no longer be shocked and unprepared when educated, middle-class Muslims participate in brutal acts of terrorism. Indeed, we should assume that this modus operandi will be a fact of life for some time to come.

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