Terrorists of every stripe have one thing in common: their bourgeois upbringing, says daniel hannan |
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First comes the suicide bomb. Then the identification of the terrorist. Then the denials by his friends and family, who insist that he was a quiet young man, and that there has been a mistake. Then the hand-wringing editorials wondering how a grammar school boy/university graduate/ doctor could possibly have got involved with Islamist radicals.
In fact, most Islamo-terrorists - the London Tube bombers, the 9/11 murderers and, as far as we can tell, the NHS cell - are bourgeois. Nor should this surprise us. Despite the Left's mulish insistence that terrorism is the product of poverty and despair, it has traditionally been a middle-class activity.
From Mohammed Bouyeri, the Morrocan Dutch boy who sliced open the film-maker Theo Van Gogh, to Mohammed Atta, the Islamists share the same profile. Indeed, |
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| The Islamist bombers are little different from the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Red Brigades |
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theirs is the template of the terrorist through the ages: male, youngish, shy with women, fairly bright, contemptuous of bourgeois society. In this regard, the Islamist bombers are little different from the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Red Brigades.
Many young men have a propensity to violence of course, but in most cases it remains latent. The trigger for terrorism often turns out to have been membership of a sect which validates - indeed elevates - the Sturm und Drang of its adherents, telling them that they feel aggressive, not because there is something wrong with them, but because there is something wrong with everyone else.
We are dealing with a phenomenon that is both modern and modernist - it makes no concessions either to traditional practice or to human frailty. When commentators call Islamism 'medieval', they are wrong. Medieval Islam was comparatively tolerant. This phenomenon has more in common with fascism, communism and every other 'ism' that proposes to efface human nature and start again. That is what makes it so dangerous. 
FIRST POSTED JULY 6, 2007
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