Calling Doctor Terror

Have you been wondering how doctors could have been involved in the terrorist plots in England?

As I do, you probably envision those engaged in scientific endeavors as having an outlook which closely adheres to Western ideals — i.e., both of objectivity and of a valid wall of separation between the tenets of faith and those of science. In fact, it’s hard to get your mind around another ideal, one in which religious belief trumps any other point of view and the Hippocratic Oath is subservient to the oath of submission to Allah.

Unfortunately, however, that is exactly the (covert) position of many Muslim scientists. We’d better understand this mindset, rather than assume — as we often have — that a Western education doth a Western mind make. This is a habit of thinking that has gotten us in trouble before: we equate terrorism with poverty and lack of schooling when precisely the opposite is true. The Muslim Brotherhood is not a group of illiterates sitting under a palm tree. These people are highly educated and many of them are in the upper middle class.

Think of Tariq Ramadan, whose grandfather helped found the Brotherhood and whose father moved the family to Switzerland. Ramadan teaches at the London School of Economics and is a card-carrying member of the elites. That doesn’t mean he respects or wants to preserve the Western way of life.

To get a sense of the differences between British doctors and the MB physician, just look at the expectations for each. Here is an outline for the principles of good medical practice in the UK:

• Patients must be able to trust doctors with their lives and health. To justify that trust you must show respect for human life and you must:
  
• Make the care of your patient your first concern
  
• Protect and promote the health of patients and the public
  
• Provide a good standard of practice and care
  • Keep your professional knowledge and skills up to date
  • Recognise and work within the limits of your competence
  • Work with colleagues in the ways that best serve patients’ interests
  
  
• Treat patients as individuals and respect their dignity
  • Treat patients politely and considerately
  • Respect patients’ right to confidentiality
  
  
• Work in partnership with patients
  • Listen to patients and respond to their concerns and preferences
  • Give patients the information they want or need in a way they can understand
  • Respect patients’ right to reach decisions with you about their treatment and care
  • Support patients in caring for themselves to improve and maintain their health
  
  
• Be honest and open and act with integrity
  • Act without delay if you have good reason to believe that you or a colleague may be putting patients at risk
  • Never discriminate unfairly against patients or colleagues
  • Never abuse your patients’ trust in you or the public’s trust in the profession.
  
  
• You are personally accountable for your professional practice and must always be prepared to justify your decisions and actions.

And here is the outline of good Muslim Brotherhood action world wide:

Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.
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Doesn’t look much like the Hippocratic Oath, does it? I can’t think of a program better designed to make an instant Islamophobe out of the average person facing a Muslim doctor or nurse they don’t know.

The Spectator (UK), has published an essay by Stephen Schwartz, the international director of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism, in Washington and London. This group has conducted a study entitled “Scientific Training and Radical Islam”. Here they analyzed how the professionals in a number of scientific disciplines are “transformed into bloodthirsty extremists”:

There is no doubt about the special role played by radicalised professionals — mainly doctors and engineers — in the rise of Islamic extremism. This first came to the attention of the world with the infiltration of Egyptian medical and related professional associations by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), culminating in the 1990s. Doubtless the most infamous representative of this trend was the Egyptian second-in-command of al-Qa’eda, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri — a physician from a family of doctors and pharmacists. But the MB also has immense influence among Palestinians through its offshoot, Hamas, as well as in Jordan and even in Iraq, where its front, the Iraq Islamic party, serves in the Baghdad government.

Why do doctors in Muslim countries sacrifice their long years of rigorous education in the ethics of ‘doing no harm’ and embrace such brutalising concepts as ‘death to unbelievers’? To Western medical and scientific personnel, who are taught to guard human life and to base their researches and healing on reason, the violence and contempt for life exhibited by al-Zawahiri and his colleagues in al-Qa’eda are both frightening and puzzling. How, it is asked, can a person trained to heal, according to a scientific discipline, behave with such ruthless contempt for life?

As we have seen, being trained to heal can be trumped by a mindset that has never left the 8th century. Medicine and religion are inextricably twined, with the latter being in ascendance:

Our study, focusing on Arab and Pakistani doctors (the latter both at home and abroad) revealed that throughout much of the Islamic world, medicine and religion are bound together in a manner that has largely disappeared in the West. For Western doctors, medicine may draw on religious ethics; but for Muslim doctors, it draws on religious ethics and on the Islamic view of the universe. Furthermore, many Muslims associate healing with their religious leaders, and in the more traditional Islamic countries the imam is typically the first (and often the last) person consulted by the ill, and prayer or faith-healing prescriptions are the only therapies.

Millennia ago, Christianity often associated healing with religious people, though not necessarily their leaders. One of the requirements for official sainthood in the Catholic Church was — and is — some kind of unexplained, miraculous healing. And in the very early years of the Church, martyrdom was a common price for belief. At no time, however, were Christian martyrs required to murder as many heathens as possible.

My point is that even in the very beginnings of Christianity, the emphasis was never on murder, mayhem and subjugation. At different periods in history political influences subverted the Christian message. In fact, you can see it in operation today with some of the more extreme Christian enthusiasts in the US — those who claim that the murdering Islamists of 9/11 are God’s judgment on the sinful. However, bad theology has never been the exclusive property of any particular religion. As One Cosmos says, there are mind parasites everywhere.

It is not an absolute that Islam = jihad. As the author of this study points out:

Osama bin Laden used his personal wealth to build schools and hospitals in Sudan, and thereby gained credibility as a benefactor and provider of healing services. But it should also be noted that, by contrast, the Indonesian Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), a Sufi and traditionalist body with 40 million members, operates large and successful networks of schools, hospitals and community rehabilitation projects without recourse to extremist ideology. NU ‘good works’ are Islamic, but not Islamist, and they deserve greater attention from those in the West hypnotised by the public welfare programmes of groups like the Egyptian MB and Hamas.

But peaceful groups won’t get our deserved attention. They’re not trying to kill us; they’re not trying to annihilate the West.

The phenomenon of global terror is not driven by the poor, but by the middle class. The further down the economic scale you go, the more crucial are the concerns with survival. But economic success in a culture that feels narcissistically wounded (and privileged) is bound to turn to force and barbarism to prove its superiority. This is not about equality, and it never was. Besides, “brotherhood” in the West has never meant conquest, and fraternity evolved as we moved out of the tribe. This evolution never occurred in Islamic culture, which remains tribal, unequal, and a stranger to liberty.

No, we have more to fear from the middle class Muslim than we do from the Muslim “street” — those poor souls manipulated and used and killed for the sake of some Utopian Ummah. As the study warns us:

There are many more ‘killer doctors’ in the world of extremist Islam. In our study we have documented notable cases in the US, where the phenomenon of radical Muslim doctors is well-known. These individuals suffer from divided minds, in which their professional duties clash with their ideological fantasies. They are driven not by faith, or by training, or by professional standing or aspiration, but by an ideology of fundamentalist separatism. Ideology unites them — but they are alienated from the reality of authentic religiosity as well as personal ethics and professional fulfilment.

The next time some morally superior being accuses you of Islamophobia because of your rational concern about the next blow, just remind him of the Islamist doctor’s oath:

Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.