What
Drove A Doctor To Become
A Suicide Bomber?
By Chris Marsden
12 July, 2007
WSWS.org
The
detention of at least seven medics in connection with last week’s
failed terror attacks in Britain has added to the public’s sense
of shock. All the more so since the alleged perpetrators of the attacks
were both initially identified as doctors working at Glasgow’s
Royal Alexandra Hospital.
These were, after all, men
said to have driven two Mercedes packed with petrol, gas cylinders and
nails and parked them in London’s West End, one of them outside
a crowded nightclub on Ladies Night, and then driven back to Scotland
to carry out a suicide attack on Glasgow Airport. Only chance prevented
terrible carnage. The driver of the explosives-loaded Jeep in Glasgow
is in critical condition after dousing himself with petrol and suffering
burns to 90 percent of his body.
It has since been revealed
that only the Jeep passenger, Bilal Talal Samad Abdullah, is a doctor.
The driver, Kafeel Ahmed, a 27-year-old from Bangalore, India, is a
highly qualified aeronautical engineer with a PhD. Even so, the participation
of two highly educated men in such an outrage—and the possible
involvement of many others from the medical profession—is a deeply
troubling aspect of an already appalling chain of events. It has prompted
many to ask how someone who in his professional life is dedicated to
saving lives could even contemplate taking the lives of so many innocent
people.
Attempts to answer this within
the media have been, at best, limited, but one issue raised stands out
as significant. An article in the July 8 Observer stated: “Terrorism
experts point out that all the members of the Hamburg cell, which planned
the 9/11 atrocities, studied technical sciences or medicine. Abdullah
Azzam, the original mentor of Osama bin Laden, was a Palestinian medical
doctor. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the spiritual leader of Al Qaeda, comes from
a family of doctors and medical experts.... As Professor Marc Sageman,
a counter-terrorism adviser to the US government observes: ‘Terrorists
are usually seen as being ignorant and immature, as coming from a poor
background and a broken family, with no skills and no family or responsibility.
Little of this is true for Al Qaeda members and supporters.’”
The claims regarding the
Hamburg Cell are overstated. Most were involved in technical rather
than medical sciences. But the point that Islamic terror groups find
fertile ground for recruitment amongst educated layers, including doctors,
remains an important one.
The leader of the July 7,
2005 attacks on London, Mohammad Sidique Khan, was also involved in
a caring profession, working as a community enrichment officer in schools
with special needs pupils and as a learning mentor. He left a suicide
video declaring, “I and thousands like me have forsaken everything
for what we believe.... Your democratically elected governments continually
perpetrate atrocities against my people all over the world. Your support
makes you directly responsible. We are at war and I am a soldier.”
All available evidence suggests
that such views came to be shared by Bilal Abdullah. An examination
of the biography of the only man charged so far in connection with the
terror plot helps shed light on how this came to be. And it refutes
the repeated claims of the Labour government that British foreign policy,
above all Britain’s participation in the war and occupation of
Iraq, played no role in last week’s terrorist attacks and, in
general, has nothing to do with the growth of terrorism.
Notwithstanding the terrible
nature of Abdullah’s planned crime, there is a tragic element
to his fate. He appears to be someone driven over the edge, to the point
of murderous and suicidal rage, by the systematic and ongoing destruction
of his country. Though reportedly a devout Muslim for many years, the
seeds of his participation in the plot to murder scores of innocent
men, women and children were sown by the invasion and occupation of
Iraq, the murder of perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis at the hands
of US and British troops, the incarceration and torture of thousands
more, and the civil war between Sunni and Shia sparked by the destruction
of the country and fuelled by the policies of the US-led occupation
forces.
Born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire,
he moved to Iraq with his parents as a child. His father, Talal, is
a doctor and encouraged Abdullah to follow him into the profession.
However, the end of his medical training at the University of Baghdad
coincided with the US invasion of 2003. In the year before he graduated
in 2004, his professor, Ahmed Ali, described the impact of the war on
Abdullah.
He was one of the most radical
students after the war, engaged in continual protests and active in
forming resistance groups inside the college, Professor Ali said. According
to the professor, Abdullah said, “We should not learn medicine.
We should learn how to fight the occupation.”
The war and occupation had
a devastating personal impact on Abdullah. His father was one of Iraq’s
top orthopedic surgeons and had a private clinic in Baghdad. This was
reportedly destroyed. The Daily Mirror reports that, in 2005, Talal
was forced to flee Baghdad to northern Iraq after being threatened by
the Shiite Mahdi Army.
After graduation, Abdullah
left Iraq to study at the University of Cambridge. It is not known whether
he was already politically involved with a particular group, but he
was bitterly angry, profoundly anti-Western and very possibly sympathetic
to Al Qaeda.
Much of what is reported
about Abdullah comes from Shiraz Maher, then a member of the radical
Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, who was assigned to recruit him.
He says of Abdullah, “He
told me how he hated Saddam Hussein, how even after the American invasion
his extended family stayed [in Iraq]. All were of the same ideological
persuasion. All believed in Wahhabi ideology.... He developed a vitriolic
hatred for the Shias after one of his closest friends at university
in Iraq was killed by a Shia militiaman. He would say they needed to
be massacred.”
Maher continued, “Bilal
talked about the validity of jihad, about expelling American and British
troops. He described jihad as the highest pinnacle of Islam.... He would
laugh when we talked about a particular bomb attack in Iraq. We all
rejoiced then.”
Abdullah reportedly never
mixed socially with white people and even spurned Muslims who he considered
to be too westernised. Maher describes how Abdullah threatened one of
his flat mates for playing the guitar and showed him a video of Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi (the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, killed by the US in
2006) beheading a hostage. According to Maher, Abdullah threatened his
flat mate, saying, “If you think I’m messing about, this
is what we do. This is what our people do—we slaughter.”
Those seeking to deny or
minimize the role played by the Iraq war in fostering terrorism more
and more fall back on the assertion that its perpetrators are Islamic
fundamentalists, adherents of an ideology that is unconditionally opposed
to the West. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has taken up this mantra from
his forerunner Tony Blair, insisting in the aftermath of the failed
car bombings that terrorism is “unrelated in detail to one specific
point of conflict in the world.”
The media has slavishly echoed
this theme, with many publications citing the views of former Islamic
fundamentalist Hassan Butt that “what drove me and many others
to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense
that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide
Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.” The issue
is then reduced to the supposed doctrinal problems of Islam and the
inability of radical Islamists to relate to the non-Islamic world. In
Butt’s memorable phrase, “Since Islam must declare war on
unbelief, they have declared war on the whole world.”
Such explanations are almost
invariably accompanied by yet more transparent apologias for the incendiary
actions of the major powers, insisting that any and all feelings of
indignation and bitterness towards the West are based on “mythical”
grievances. What is required is the correct pursuit of Brown’s
campaign to win “hearts-and-minds,” by encouraging Imams
and Muslim people to combat extremist doctrines and insisting on a respect
for “British values” of tolerance and democracy.
One cannot imagine a more
toxic mixture of arrogance and stupidity.
Such claims amount to a political
blank check for whatever further predatory actions may be taken by British
imperialism and for measures targeting British Muslims, which invariably
encroach on universal democratic rights such as free speech. They can
only help drive angry and disoriented individuals such as Abdullah towards
fanatical and reactionary forms of political Islam. What other outcome
could result from preaching “British values” to those whose
lives have been ruined and who have seen hundreds of thousands of their
countrymen and co-religionists killed—all in the name of spreading
democracy?
At no point can such apologetics
even pose the question as to what drives apparently intelligent young
men to embrace the reactionary ideology of Islamic fundamentalism and
join the ranks of terrorist groups, or the growth of Islamist parties
and movements more generally.
Islamic fundamentalism has
emerged out of a terrible tragedy, one that is played out on a daily
basis and which affects not merely the small number of individuals drawn
to terror groups, but millions of the world’s people. The hell-on-earth
created in Iraq is only the most brutal example of the depredations
inflicted by the Western powers on the Middle East and other regions,
creating the conditions for Islamist movements to find a receptive audience
amongst all social layers, including the most politically disoriented
representatives of the middle classes.
Islamic fundamentalism is
an ideology promoted and utilized by broad swathes of the Arab bourgeoisie
to legitimize their own rule. Whabbism, or Salafism, is the official
doctrine of the Saudi ruling elite, out of which Al Qaeda emerged, combining
as it does an ultra-conservative theology with fanatical anticommunism
and a defence of private property and class oppression. The very Western
powers that now rail most vocally against Islamic fundamentalism, the
United States and Britain, played an instrumental role in cultivating
these movements in Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere precisely for this
reason.
Ultimately, however, the
ability of Islamic fundamentalism to win mass influence is due to the
absence of a genuinely progressive, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist
alternative.
In the past, millions of
people—many with a similar background to Abdullah—sought
to oppose imperialist oppression on a progressive and often socialist
basis. In particular, they looked to the Stalinist Communist parties,
only to have the confidence they placed in them repeatedly and bloodily
betrayed. The Iraqi Communist Party, which once had more than 25,000
members and enjoyed a mass following, supported the military government
of Abd al-Karim Qasim and then accommodated itself to the Baathist regime
that came to power in 1963, forming a national Front with it in 1973.
When Saddam Hussein turned on his former Stalinist allies, in part to
signal his desire for an accommodation with Washington, many thousands
of militant workers and socialist intellectuals were imprisoned and
executed. Since 2003, the Iraqi Communist Party has participated in
the puppet regime installed by the US.
The rise of Islamism is also
the price paid for the degeneration and failure of the secular nationalist
movements—many of which presented themselves as socialist—but
which either collapsed or became the direct instruments of imperialist
rule and now preside over despotic regimes.
It is this political vacuum
that has been partially filled by the Islamists, who feed off of the
very real and legitimate grievances generated by imperialist domination
and capitalist exploitation and channel them in a misanthropic and regressive
direction. At its root, it is an ideology of political despair, the
path taken by some who see no other course and no other mass movement
that so much as makes a pretence of offering sustained opposition to
such historic crimes as the destruction of Iraq.
As was so horribly demonstrated
with the July 7, 2005 London bombers, Islamist fundamentalism can find
support in Britain because the mass popular opposition to war and to
the Labour government’s socially divisive measures can find no
expression within the official structures of politics.
Combating the growth of Islamic
extremism is possible, therefore, only through the forging of a new
political and social movement in Britain and internationally based on
a socialist programme—one that mobilises a united offensive of
working people for an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan,
the defeat of imperialism, and the economic and cultural elevation of
the world’s people on the basis of genuine democracy and social
equality.
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