Author: Theodore Dalrymple
Publication: City Journal
Date: January 20, 2004
URL: http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_01_20_04td.html
For some on the Left, purported
bigotry against Muslims explains Islamist terror. | 20 January 2004
The idea that if someone is prepared
to do something truly horrible, he must have a worthy cause remains attractive
to liberal intellectuals, who perhaps envy those who take up arms against
the sea of troubles that is human existence.
Last week's New Statesman, the British
left-wing weekly (for which I also write), provided a fine example of this
way of thinking in an article about Islamophobia by travel writer William
Dalrymple (no relation). He pointed out that the kidnapper of Daniel Pearl,
the Wall Street Journal reporter abducted, tortured, and then murdered
in Pakistan in early 2002, was a British Muslim who had attended public
school (public in this context meaning private) and the London School of
Economics.
Dalrymple wrote: "The man who kidnapped
Pearl in Karachi was a highly educated British Pakistani, Ahmed Omar Sheikh.
Sheikh attended the same public school as the film-maker Peter Greenaway
and later studied at the London School of Economics. Yet such was the racism
he suffered, that he was drawn towards extreme jehadi groups and eventually
came to be associated with both Harkat ul- Mujahideen and al-Qaeda."
Now Sheikh's father must have spent
at least $20,000 a year, and probably more, on his son's education for
five years or more: surely a sign of reasonable economic success in his
adopted country. Moreover, Sheikh was then admitted to an elite institution
of higher education. Was this nothing to set against the insults that he
no doubt sometimes suffered? Surely only a man bent on evil would not take
these advantages into account in assessing his own situation. Is suffering
insults a reason to torture a stranger to death (the video of the torture,
by the way, is being distributed in certain circles)? Dalrymple comes perilously
close to condoning what he is trying to explain.
He goes on: "If intelligent, successful
and well-educated British Muslims such as Omar Sheikh can be so readily
drawn to the world of the jehadis, we are in trouble." Indeed, we are.
The fact is, the kind of success that British society offered Sheikh, evidence
of its comparative openness despite instances of insult and discrimination,
did not satisfy him. He was in the grip of a utopian ideology, just as
many successful people in Britain and elsewhere-all of whom no doubt had
some reason or other for despising and hating the way in which they had
been brought up, because that is the nature of human existence-were once
attracted to communism, another ideology that would have destroyed their
own freedom.
The article continues: "The combination
of widespread hostility to the Muslims in our midst, pervasive discrimination
against them and huge ignorance is a potentially lethal cocktail." The
only ingredient that seems to be missing from this cocktail is Islam.
