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For the Islamist doctor, terror is healing

Wednesday, 4th July 2007

Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi say that radical Islam is less the product of extreme deprivation than of the thwarted aspirations of the Muslim middle classes and professionals

The car bombs in London and Glasgow show that a global counter-offensive against the war on terror is well underway. Although Iraq is the main zone of conflict, Saudi-financed Wahhabi radicals — known to polite Western journalists as ‘Sunni insurgents’ — seek to export ‘al-Qa’eda in Iraq’ everywhere throughout the world.

But with the British car-bomb campaign a new element has emerged. For the first time in Europe doctors are among the suspects. One of them, Mohammed Asha, is described as a ‘brilliant’ neurosurgeon from Jordan; another, Bilal Abdullah, is an Iraqi doctor. The phenomenon of the radicalised professional broadens a hitherto limited field of inquiry for terror investigators. Our organisation, the Centre for Islamic Pluralism, has recently completed a study, ‘Scientific Training and Radical Islam’, in which we analyse how the professionals in a number of scientific disciplines are transformed into bloodthirsty extremists.

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Labour’s U-turn on social housing for non-immigrants is welcome but too late

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says that metropolitan liberal ideology is too deeply ingrained in local councils, social services and the judiciary to be overturned by one panic measure driven by Labour’s sudden fear of the BNP

To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with

Cass Sunstein

Cass Sunstein — co-author of the hugely influential Nudge and an adviser to President Obama — unveils his new theory of ‘group polarisation’, and explains why, when like-minded people spend time with each other, their views become not only more confident but more extreme

Who would have thought a herd could moonwalk?

Mark Earls

The acclaimed web theorist, Mark Earls, says that the death of Michael Jackson unleashed the extremes of collective action: mass mourning and sick jokes

A splendid lunch with Jimmy McNulty

Deborah Ross

In the first of an occasional series of interviews over meals, Deborah Ross talks to Dominic West about The Wire and the challenge to an Old Etonian of playing an American cop

What Jacko needed was someone to say ‘No’

Uri Geller

My defining memory of Michael Jackson — vulnerable, brilliant, otherworldly — is of watching him dance to the soundtrack of a movie.

A strong line required

Robert Salisbury

Putin and the Rise of Russia, by Michael Stuermer

An evening with the Muslim Facebook crew

Sarfraz Manzoor

Sarfraz Manzoor celebrates an iftar meal with homeless people and his fellow Muslims, a web-generated ‘flashmob’ observing an Islamic tradition of generosity to the needy

Zardari is even more afraid than Musharraf

Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi

Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi say the Marriott bomb in Islamabad shows how weak the new Pakistani President is in the face of the Talebanised sectors of this failing state