Why They Hate Our Freedoms

The Arabs behind the attempted bombings in London and Scotland seem oddly suited to their role: highly educated physicians, not religious, and intermarried with Christians. It would be interesting to get some insight into their motivations and behavior. Juan Cole makes some guesses:

A cell made up of 7 medical personnel from Jordan and Iraq appears to have been behind the attempted bombing at Picadilly Circus on Friday and the actual car bombing at the Glasgow airport this weekend. One is a neurologist, Muhammad Asha, from Jordan. Another is an Iraqi physician, Bilal Abdulla. CNN is reporting that Asha's family back in Jordan is stunned. They are middle class, not religious, and intermarried with Christians.

Why would highly educated and relatively well off professionals behave this way? I think this sort of cell suggests that three kinds of sociological theory need to be synthesized in order to understand contemporary social movements-- Social constructivism, resource mobilization theory and European new social movement theory....

The kind of thinking they would be engaged in (I don't know details) would typically be, "Britain and the US are conducting a genocide against Arab Muslims in Iraq, are ethnically cleansing Fallujah, Baqubah, and Baghdad, and this must be stopped and cannot be borne. Something must be done, something dramatic, to draw the attention of an apathetic public to the kind of policies they are supporting."

The narrative will be one-sided, exaggerated, black-and-white, with pure heroes and black-hearted villains. Typically they were not upset when Saddam Hussein was massacring 300,000 Iraqis, or when the Talaban were massacring people in Mazar-i Sharif and Bamiyan. (Baathi or Salafi bombings of Shiites in Baghdad also likely do not disturb them). A foreign/indigenous dynamic informs their outrage, so that indigenous atrocities are not (as) objectionable as what are seen as imperial interventions.

And then there will be the leap to irrational and counter-productive violence against innocents. Putting gasoline cannisters in a car and setting it on fire in front of a dance club or an airport isn't likely to actually change policy. It was even amateurish terrorism, since they only managed to set themselves and their car on fire. I suggested yesterday that the Glasgow Airport operation seemed more focused on suicide than on killing others, though they may have hoped to take some passengers with them. Neither homicide nor suicide actually helps their cause. If the group wanted to change British policy, they could have become activists in politics and given money to the Liberal Democrat party. Indeed, terrorism has the effect of reinforcing right-wing policy.

It's well worth reading even if it is just guesswork. Prof. Cole has put a lot of study into understanding modern Arab thinking. Simple minded cliches like those favored by Bush can never understand this kind of terrorist and will lead to ever more calamitous errors.