Theodore Dalrymple: "The Suicide Bombers Among Us"

I was alerted to this by LGF, and I wish they would present more items like this. It tells us 100 times more than an excerpt from a news story about a terrorist act or oppression of women along with a thread-title about the "ROP." The following, for instance, is a corrective to both left-wing and right-wing notions about suicide bombers. While the right tends to picture suicide bombers as merely youth indoctrinated by evil clerics, the left tends to picture them as patient, long-suffering victims of oppression finally driven over the edge etc. Dalrymple offers a corrective to both views:

The dissatisfactions of young Muslim men in Britain are manifold. Most will experience at some time slighting or downright insulting remarks about them or their group—the word “Paki” is a term of disdainful abuse—and these experiences tend to grow in severity and significance with constant rehearsal in the mind as it seeks an external explanation for its woes. Minor tribulations thus swell into major injustices, which in turn explain the evident failure of Muslims to rise in their adopted land. The French-Iranian researcher Farhad Khosrokhavar, who interviewed 15 French Muslim prisoners convicted of planning terrorist acts, relates in his book, Suicide Bombers: Allah’s New Martyrs, how some of his interviewees had been converted to the terrorist outlook by a single insulting remark—for example, when one of their sisters was called a “dirty Arab” when she explained how she couldn’t leave home on her own as other girls could. Such is the fragility of the modern ego—not of Muslims alone, but of countless people brought up in our modern culture of ineffable self-importance, in which an insult is understood not as an inevitable human annoyance, but as a wound that outweighs all the rest of one’s experience.