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Doc Jihad
How could doctors, pledged to heal, conspire to murder and maim?
By Stanley Kurtz

How could doctors, pledged to heal, conspire to murder and maim? In the wake of the foiled British terror plots, that is the question on everyone’s lips. It’s anything but an idle query. On the contrary, if we attend not to the plot’s specifics, but to the larger questions raised by the paradox of murderous healers, the solution to the terror-doctor puzzle takes us deep into the mystery of Islamism.

The doctors’ plot shocks for several interconnected reasons. The paradox of the murderous healer is part of it. Yet there’s also the conviction that terrorism stems from poverty. The fashionable notion that terrorists must somehow be poor is mistaken. Numerous studies have concluded that Islamist terrorists tend to be relatively well-educated members of the middle and upper classes. Since the doctors’ terror cell was uncovered, it’s been widely noted that Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a physician, as have been numerous leaders of Palestinian terror groups (for example, Dr. George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). Why, then, despite repeated disconfirmation, does the “poverty theory” of terrorism persist?

In part, of course, there’s the conventional liberal preference for rooting crime in material deprivation, rather than culture. Terrorists are criminals, so they must be poor. That theory makes it easy to downplay politically incorrect links between terrorism and Islam. Yet there’s something else at work as well.

Deep down, many of us believe that history has a direction — that it slowly but surely moves toward greater freedom, democracy, economic advancement, and social liberalism — in short, toward “modernity.” President Bush is convinced that people everywhere yearn for freedom. And many liberals, even if they oppose the President’s policies, believe that expanded education and economic development will gradually nudge the world’s peoples toward a liberal governing vision. If human beings are fundamentally rational and good (rather than inescapably torn between good and evil), then in the long term, freedom and prosperity should solve our problems. So free and prosperous terrorist doctors are an affront to our fundamental faith in the future — and our belief in humanity itself.

Conservatives, it’s true, are virtually defined by their conviction that the forward movement of history exacts social costs that ought to be moderated, offset, or opposed. And many, especially religious, conservatives see human beings as torn, struggling, and flawed creatures. Yet in America, even conservatives are “liberal,” in the sense that they favor the gradual, world-wide expansion of free markets and democracy. So we tend to regard well-educated and well-remunerated professionals as the epitome of humanitarian and freedom-loving middle-class moderns. What does it tell us that the terror doctors are anything but that?

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