Who knows?
Eight suspects 'have links to NHS'
Press Association
Wednesday July 4, 2007 4:53 AM
All eight people arrested in connection with car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow have links to the NHS.
Seven are believed to be doctors or trainee doctors while the one woman under arrest is a trained laboratory researcher. [More at:] http://www.guardian.co.uk
What we don't read in the press is that, as we know, all of the folks arrested and those others being sought in connection with these latest attempts at indiscriminate mass murder are Muslims who read the Koran and know more about it than most of us do. If they follow the religion they know, why do we find our own non-Muslim experts telling us the Muslims don't know their own religion? This last lot of jihadis, much like many others in the jihad business, are not stupid or starving or desperate in any normal sense of our experience. So why not give these people credit for the brain power they obviously have, and give them credit too for knowing their own religion well enough to practice it properly. If we know Islam better than the average Muslim medical doctor, why friend, should we think he knows medicine better than we do? If you know more medicine than the doctor, heal thyself. If you know Islam better than a Muslim doctor, why not become an imam? But if all this is seeming
to make sense and you find you're faced with a Muslim doctor who has your trust in his knowledge of specialized areas, then what are you going to do if you find yourself alone with him getting advice about your own life, Mr. Finkleschwartz, Mrs. Trollope, Miss pregnant teen-age girl, tribal tattoo dude? I haven't looked in the phone book under physicians to find out how many doctors in this city are named Abu, Ali, Mohammed, Omar, Uthman, and so on. If I found myself in need of a doctor I'd think twice about anyone with a name like that. Why? Because I give them credit for knowing their own religion, and it demands they call us to Islam, demand that we convert, pay jizya, or die. I don't want a doctor with an approach to medicine that includes those prescriptions. I'd look in the phone book to see who to avoid in case of an emergency.
3 comments:
Well, there are two questions here: the role of Islam and the role of modern professional networks and hierarchies in encouraging conformity to ideologies that serve an elite first, at the expense of ordinary people. I wonder what you make of this argument about what kind of Islam today serves elite networks...
Just as today you can't go into one of our universities and trust a professor to be something other than a left-liberal Gnostic, until proven otherwise, a similar rule will now unfold with Muslim professionals. Where you find a person who has all the qualities of one who goes with the flow, watch out because the flow is now towards the worst kind of Islam and it will be increasingly difficult for any professional to keep or get his job without thinking and acting how peer pressure demands.
(I wonder if McMaster U. will start to have second thoughts about defending its cadre of Egyptian nuclear engineers in light of the doctors' plot.)
However, we still have in Canada old school professional Muslims who did not come to their positions by following the most puritanical fundamentalism, but rather by trying to join global modernity to some degree, and in future we may be lucky to discover we still have such people. But the onus is now on us to make very careful investigation of who can we trust. Al Qaeda's strategy is clearly to make it difficult for us to trust any Moslem that we will eventually submit from the sheer need to not live in fear. They know they are ripping our liberal societies apart. It is going to take a lot of smarts and responsible men to avoid widespread violence and chaos the longer the nutters on the left and the Jihadi side continue ascendant in the professions. We need to act from calm resolution in this light.
David Warren is one of those people I read once every six months and think "Wow, why haven't I seen this guy's work before?"
The review in the next link is making the rounds like a professional drunk. I don't have much doubt that his over-all synopsis is right, that there are the three schools of thought in Islam, Modernist, passive, aggressive; and that the aggressive type is in the ascendant.
I have to wonder if though bin Laden isn't totally right in his approach to the world as it is. I think he is: that we must go to war to sort out who will rule the ethos. But it will always be like that. when we conquer the Muslims and destroy Islam and possibly wipe out half of the world's population in a frenzy of hatred, then, in reflection, we'll look at ourselves and see Nazis, prompting a further swing to this crap again. And so on in a parody of Hegelian dialectic.
Allow me to quote my favorite doctor, Dr. Pangloss: "This is the best in the best of all possible worlds." We have before us a war that we will win, and we are blessed in our chance to be part of it. It doesn't get any better, not for us, and it doesn't get any better for our enemies.
To paraphrase Churchill in his book The River War:
The Madhi Army were the most heroic men and the best, bravest warriors I have ever had the privilege of meeting in battle. They were so brave they fought to the last man. They would not give up in cowardice, preferring to die to the last man.
Alright, we don't always deal with the smartest people on Earth here. My post above, for example, seems to have stumped the majority of readers, if the comment at IBA is an indication. Churchill, to make it plain, writes that the British hunted down and killed everyone they could find, then called them heroes who refused to surrender, everyone winning, in the end. And we can do so too. We can act and say and never the twain shall meet, and all will win.
Nature has needs, and Nature today needs development that we will fulfill: People will accept the hardships and responsibilities of adulthood and adult culture as mature if unhappy people, or Nature will allow us to slip back into the usual state of Man as farm animal. It's our choice, and it will be one way or the other because Nature cannot stand the imbalance between us now. It means war, and that war means extermination of one group or the other.
We will win this war, but how we conduct ourselves is the key to whether the winning will be worth the victory. Most people will not get it. That seems not to matter. Nature will continue, and life will go on regardless. There will be another war of this scale at some other point, and over roughly the same issue. But this war in this time is our war, and we are blessed in being alive for it. There's no going back and there's not a hope of changing it into something we can live with peacefully. So what do we do to win well?
I cannot begin to describe how stunned I am at the seeming impenetrable my post above is to others, and given that it is so, I have to question the audience of the greater nation. If they cannot understand simple things, then the complexities of our situation will be opaque to the point they will live down and die in a state of terrified but dull soulessness like the inmates of the Nazi death camps. We, not gnostic knowers of some higher truth but simply people who grasp the fundamentals of common life experience must be willing and able to grasp the problems of this war and make it work while the majority sit in shock and perplexity and possible anger at our means to victory.
Given my age I can claim to have known a woman who spent three days under a dead horse because a British bomber on his way from Rome dropped his load on a train going to Auschwitz. A meaningless gesture and a convenience on the part of a bomber who had some bombs left saved some people from the Nazis. Life is weird. But then again it's not irrational for a bomber to bomb a German train in the war. It is irrational for a British cabinet minister to complain about bombing Germany because it destroyed private property. What do we do? We do in spite of the idiocies of some if not perhaps most who would otherwise go to their deaths uncomprehending and even protesting like Zinoviev. Some people just don't get it, and they might never get it and that, if left to themselves will be the death of them all, which the rest of us need not have any sympathy for just because the majority wish to do nothing. Let's not wait for chance to spare us under a dead horse-- should we be so lucky. Act or be damned.
And the dmnation is that of the Scots who would have never lived under MacBeth. Bin Laden is the Muslim world's tragic hero, their MacBeth, and he is organically necessary. The Duncan of Islam is rotten and will not give over; he must be murdered to allow for the MacBeth of bin Laden to die a tragic end and to usher in the new. The change over is required in blood and pain, and we must act by the lights of Nature. No great conspiracy at work here, not a plot by an oil company to be found anywhere. It's the nature of Nature at work here.
And in winning this we pass the torch to our children who'll confront the next need of Nature in their time. That's life, and I for one happen to like it very much. That's why I won't be missing it by climbing onto the train. People mostly aren't going to get it, and there's probably no reason for them to understand things beyond the daily norms. War is here and we fight it to win it. It's a good thing. Emote all we will, Nature does not care a whit. And neither do I. War is the way it is.
People, as David Warren points out, are bullied. Well, I'm going for the bullies. What others think of what I do to the bullies is not important or interesting. It's the nature of Nature. Someone rules, and someone will be us or someone will be them. Nature will not allow a compromise. Nor will I, for what that's worth at this time. And I like it.
If you like it too, if you want to get up and get out and do some great thing, even if that's simply coming to the library to sit in the atrium having coffee and talking for a few hours, then join us Thursday from 7-9:00 p.m. near Blenz coffee bar. Or I might see your puzzled face on the train as you pass me by waving to you from the forest.
Heh, I think i got the post, and it was even better knowing about your acting career, Mr. Zion.
Sure we have to go to war until we win; the hard mental work is knowing what kind of war this is, as much civil as foreign, as much political as military. It's no wonder lots of people don't get it. They don't have the paradigms into which to put what is going on, because what's going on is something new in the world, not simply nature doing the same old same old, though there's some of that too. As A. Katz points out in his latest essay at NER, for an awful lot of people, the need to believe that 9/11 didn't happen is so great because they have nowhere on their mental maps to put Islam as it actually is. To some extent that must be true for the Jihadis too.
Post a Comment