"Terror doctors": anatomy of a void concept

Michel Thieren, 12 July 2007

Subjects:

How can saviours of life become takers? In the wake of the al-Qaida terror plot involving British-based health professionals, Michel Thieren explores the history and idea of the "evil doctor".

On 2 July 2007, British police authorities announced that all eight people tied to the failed terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow on 29-30 June were medical professionals. Doctors? How could that be? The shock was palpable on everyone's lips, in all media outlets, news reports, and blogs. "A surgeon's trajectory takes an unlikely swerve", a New York Times story was titled. Edwin Borman, chairman of the British Medical Association's international committee, told the BBC that the link with NHS doctors "would be a ‘betrayal' of society because of the oath they sign up to promising to do no harm". Abdula Shehu, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain's health committee, worried about an eventual backlash: "To generalise about an event like this and think that Muslim doctors generally should have a different kind of treatment or perception in a negative way should not be the issue here", he said.

The reaction in the blogosphere has been sharp: "Al Qaeda's doctors have turned (the doctors' oath) on its head to 'First do as much harm as possible and kill anyone you don't know. Not even Mengele himself distorted the medical profession like that". With more realism, Pauline Neville-Jones, former (1991-94) head of Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee, wonders "how people's values can be so perverted" and how meaningless it is to assume anything about the kind of people who might become terrorists.

Michel Thieren is a Belgian physician specialising in humanitarian affairs and human rights. He has spent more than a decade managing emergency operations in non-governmental organisations and the United Nations, and was head of office in northern Bosnia for the World Health Organisation in 1995-6. He works as a medical scientist at the statistical department of the World Health Organisation in Geneva

Also by Michel Thieren in openDemocracy:

"There was genocide in Srebrenica..."
(11 July 2005)

"Katrina's triple failure"
(7 September 2005)

"Kashmir: brothers in aid"
(17 October 2005)

"Dayton plus ten: Europe interrogated" (24 November 2006) - with Louise Lambrichs

"Deaths in Iraq: how many, and why it matters"
(18 October 2006)

"Libyan justice: medicine on death row"
(19 December 2006)

"Medicine and public health in dark times" (25 April) The accumulated response suggests that being a medical professional supersedes or at least is on the same level as all other identities - ethnic, religious, national and gendered; as if "educated suicide-terrorist" is indeed the troubling oxymoron of our time and that, should these educated people be medical doctors, the oxymoron would become even more disturbing.

The deluge of comment raises difficult questions: can a professional, lifelong commitment to Hippocratic values be associated with a murdering ideology, albeit of religious or political inspiration; why do we expect a terrorist ready to die in martyrdom to be uneducated; and is there a special emotional charge connected to the evidence that there could be Muslim doctors who commit terrorist acts, and if so, why?

The path of medical perversion

The fact is that physicians are human beings first, and thus are not immune from any Faustian bargain. The prevention of simplistic generalisation is more important than digging deep into the mystery of "evil doctors". There are two dangers: to fail to distinguish between ideological crimes committed by doctors and medical crimes committed in the name of science (whether by doctors or not); and to avoid creating issues around the pseudo-emergence of a "medical Islamism" or an "al-Qaida-isation" of medicine. The use of medical knowledge in terror's agenda does not necessarily spring from Islamism. The darkest times of medicine can be found far from today's United Kingdom.

The 20th century in Europe is the era of genocide - Turkey during the first world war, the holocaust in the second world war, and the Balkans in the early 1990s - and this entailed concomitant darkness for medicine and public health.

In 1915, Dr Nazim, one of the masterminds of the Armenian genocide, embraced "Turkism", the comprehensive, integrative idea seeking to bind people of the supposed same race, ancestors, soil and blood. Nazim was an influential doctor ready to put his knowledge into practice to orchestrate mass deportation and killings in the name of "Turkism" more diligently. Almost eighty years later, Radovan Karadzic, the executioner of the "greater Serbia" dream in Bosnia, did not hesitate to trump his own commitment to the oath to carry out ethnic cleansing (even if he did not himself participate directly in medical offences).

The most pathognomonic case of medical perversion by far is that of the Nazi doctors. Leo Alexander, principal medical expert investigator in the Nuremberg medical trial (USA v Karl Brandt et al), recalls: "Whatever proportions these crimes finally assumed, it became evident to all who investigated them that they had started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance (...) that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived. [...]. Gradually, the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted and finally all non-Germans. But it is important to realize that the infinitely small wedged-in lever from which this entire trend of mind received its impetus was the attitude towards the nonrehabilitable sick" (see Leo Alexander, "Medical Science under Dictatorship", New England Journal of Medicine, 40/46, (1949).

Robert Jay Lifton, in line with Alexander's reasoning, explained Nazi doctors by reference to a "doubling self" (see The Nazi Doctors, Basic Books, 1986), while for bioethics experts Paul Weindling and Volker Roelcke Nazi medicine "followed the intrinsic logic of their scientific disciplines" and constituted as a whole an act of predation in the name of science and by science itself of a rogue system to facilitate its own advancement (see Volker Roelcke & Giovanni Maio, eds., Twentieth Century Ethics of Human Subjects Research. Historical Perspectives on Values, Practices, and Regulations (Franz Steiner Verlag 2004; quoted by Alex Dracobly here).

Medical crimes, evil doctors, bad medicine

Beyond historical interpretations, physicians from Turkey to Germany and Bosnia have commuted a principle of healing into a principle of harming. In the public eye, what counts is that Hippocratic values have been violated by those entrusted with upholding them. The outcry about evil doctor is thus unavoidable. Mengele, Karadzic, Karl Brandt, Nazim, all fired with nationalism and ideologies are juxtaposed without any nuances with other criminal emblems like Harold Shipman, the serial killer of hundreds of his patients; even (and this is a very troubling amalgam) with Jack Kevorkian, nicknamed "Dr Death" - the promoter of unregulated, medically-assisted suicide. Society's eye on medicine is holistic and unconditional, leaving very little room for fine interpretations and detailed analysis on why it sometimes goes wrong.

With the recent development in Britain, the assault on evil medicine has now reached Bilal Abdulla and his "al-Qaida" doctor peers from the National Health Service. They include the detained (but not yet charged) Mohammed Asha; as a devoted father and husband, and an ambitious neurologist - one of the most competitive and prestigious specialties in medicine - the headlines have centred on him as if his case was more serious than those of his seven fellow-detainees; as if Lifton's doubling ghosts had overtaken Asha's soul.

But it is critical here not to get sidetracked and create false issues. "Islamic medicine" is not a suspicious entity and what it really is may in fact be unexpected: a system of medical writings and doctrine elaborated between the 8th and the 12th century from Baghdad and Isfahan to Marrakech and the Andalusian city of Cordoba. In the history of medicine that period corresponds to the golden age of pre-experimental medicine led by historical icons Avicenna and Averroes. A reminder of these times of enlightenment may be necessary to disarm or at least neutralise the resurging of an ethnocentric, xenophobic and colonial discourse around Islam.

Medical rationalism in medieval Islam

"Praise be to Allah, (...) In His goodness, He created man and gave him judgment and speech as privileges. He allowed him access to knowledge through the perceptions of his senses and, through reasoning, opened to him the invisible world. The mind of man is bound to a living soul of which the existence is proved beyond all doubt. Allah distributed judgment and senses among all men at the same time as life" (Avicenna's Poem on Medicine, translated by HC Krueger).

When he starts with these verses the writing of his Poem on Medicine, Avicenna (Abu Ali Ibn-Siná), was for long the undisputedly greatest physician of the Muslim empire from Iran to Spain (see Paul Mazliak, Avicenne et Averroes, médecine et biologies dans la civil isation de l'Islam, Vuibert, 2004). The poem, dedicated to his protector Chams ad-Dawla, prince of Hamadan, represents the essentials of Avicenna's monumental work The Canon of Medicine, amounting to more than a million words - annotated with his own observations and discoveries - that contain all medical knowledge available at that time including Indian Ayurveda, the old Iranian Ahuramazda tradition, Bedouin practices, and Byzantine and Hellenistic medicine (Hippocrates and Galen). The Canon of Medicine, translated from Arabic to Latin in the 12th century remained the most prominent textbook in medical schools all across the orient and the western world for almost 400 years.

Avicenna, the "prince of scholars" - together with many others like al-Razi (Rhazès), remembered for his groundbreaking Treaty on Smallpox and Measles; al-Zahrawi (Abulcasis), "the father of surgery"; and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the renowned philosopher of Muslim enlightenment in 12th-century Andalusia and the founder of a theory of intelligence - left the legacy on which Vesale and Harvey - with the advent of science and experimental medicine - established the principles of today's allopathic medicine.

What strikes most from medieval Islamic medicine is its entanglement with philosophy and religion. However, frequently at odds with their religious authorities, the physicians of the Muslim empire never compromised medical excellence to accommodate the theological doxa of their time, even if their texts make constant references to the words and precepts of Islam. Consequently, medieval Islamic medicine, despite notable scientific aberrations, came free from all sort of irrational concepts to western, Renaissance physicians. History does not necessarily determine the present but it can surely (with examples like this) illuminate it with the power of Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope. Avicennism and Averroeism are powerful barriers against contemporary forms of Islamophobia.

A void concept

In this light, an appropriate attitude towards the events of 29-30 June 2007 in Britain would be to impose interpretative restraint - by acknowledging that an all-pervasive religious ideology has the power to "call to arms" its most educated supporters in the service of humanity as well as to its opposite. As Malise Ruthven noted in 2001 on openDemocracy, the relationship between engineering students and the 9/11 attackers may root itself in an instrumentalisation of the Qur'an; a "cultural schizophrenia", echoing here again Lifton's concept of personality doubling towards Nazi doctors.

A more relevant question is whether doctors like other highly skilled educated people (scientists, physicists, and engineers) are more susceptible to the embrace of ideological rhetoric. In most medical schools, philosophy and social sciences occupy no more than a few dozen teaching hours out of a seven-year-long medical curriculum. From age 18 to 25, medical students are immersed in hardcore sciences with limited exposure to societal realities at a time when others are developing and maturing intellectually and ethically. Physicians may not possess all the social endurance needed to recognise and appraise ideological rhetoric when it comes. For a profession whose power over human's life and death is publicly evident, this can be quite worrying. Yet this is very speculative and no evidence - even the comprehensive studies by Theodor Adorno of the "authoritarian personality" conducted in the United States immediately after the second world war - has ever verified such a hypothesis.

"Evil doctors" are, then, none other than the few who - for whatever ideological or behavioural reasons - have lost their soul as humans. "Evil medicine" is nothing but the ideological reappropriation of medical science (or vice versa, the recapture by medicine of a rogue political or ideological system in the name of science). The paradox is that Bilal Abdulla or Mohammed Asha may have endured a distorted rhetoric and its consequences on a daily basis and for a long time - from Baghdad or Amman at the bedside of wounded children, to England among the tranquility of a regimented suburban life poorly receptive to socio-cultural difference.

Bilal Abdulla is shamefully versed in terrorism but his medical degree is likely to be incidental here. Abdulla may be a doctor (even if he has now been struck off the medical register), perhaps a focal person looking for allies in his core sphere of contacts in the medical community - just as a student would seek support within the company of his immediate student-peers. No more, no less.

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Comments

jdubow

12 July 2007 - 9:00pm

Michel Thieren has crafted an oh so gentle and reasonable apologia for the doctors who betrayed their profession, their society and the country that welcomed them. These betrayers are triply guilty because they violated the law, violated sacred trusts and undermined their societies in general and muslims in particular. For example, the silence of their Muslim colleagues will cause normal human beings a twinge of anxiety , or worse, when they find Muslim doctors treating them. What Theiren misses is that some action needs to be taken to ensure that justice is done, right now. Reading his article leaves me with the a residual conclusions that: (a) The West has done this too, so since everyone does this it really isn't too bad: (b) these guys deserve sympathy since their medical education didn't prepare them to resist the siren call of terror and (c) implied, if it weren't for George Bush, Israel and the US none of this would be happening. Intelligent grown-ups will see through this immediately. One way to detect nonsense is to change the names of parts of the arguments and see if the author is likely to make the same arguments (i.e. is a person of principle rather than a person of expediency). In this case, lets call the crime rape and the perpetrators white conservatives or Jews. What are the odds that Thieren or any liberal author would be writing a sympathy-for-the-Devil type of article. These doctors are despicable. They should be punished to the full extent of the law and expelled from their professional communities. It would be easier to not blame Islamism for their criminal betrayal if Muslim religious leaders were making specific and strong repudiations of these people and their colleaques. Their silence is deafening and their apologists are only stirring more resentment amongst those people capable of rapid eye movement (REM people) even if the fixed eye starers (FEST people) in the media and certain political circles approve.

Inga

12 July 2007 - 9:16pm

The examples of western doctors going bad seem to be safely historical here. Let's add to the rollcall of dishonour. The doctors who help in torturing specially rendered prisoners, for example, no doubt justifying their betrayal of medical ethics in the name of patriotism. Or the medics who assist in that state barbarity - the execution.

paul.carline

12 July 2007 - 10:27pm

I suggest it is dangerous to begin making analyses of events for some details of which we have so far only the speculations of the police and security services. As far as I am aware, there is no proven connection between the cars left in London and the strangely ineffective ram-raid at Glasgow airport. Contrary to the official and media hype, the cars in London presented little or no threat to the public. They were not 'bombs', but rather a collection of materials either chosen ineptly - or perhaps quite deliberately selected in order to create the appearance of a threat when there was none. Unfortunately, in view of the regularity with which the police and security services discover 'bomb plots' - providing easy mileage for the media and politicians - which subsequently disappear into thin air for lack of any viable evidence, it has become necessary to take with a large pinch of salt the routine revelations of supposed 'al-Qaeda linked' activity in the UK. Remember the 'liquid explosives' plot - which we were assured would have caused massive loss of life? It is perhaps the clearest example of a government/security services scam to date. The simple fact is that it is not possible to make liquid explosives on a plane. When I asked the Home Office for the scientific evidence for its claim, I was told that they could "neither confirm nor deny" whether they held any information as to the feasibility of making such explosives - clear evidence, in my view, that they have none. It is unacceptable in a supposed democracy that the government can hide behind such spurious legal defences. There is abundant evidence that the official account of the events of July 7th 2005 is implausible. Despite London being the CCTV capital of the world, there is in fact no video footage of the four supposed bombers from anywhere in London that day. The photo which purports to show them entering Luton station is a crude and very obvious forgery (for further evidence, please view the video "Ludicrous Diversions"). There is in general the problem of dual standards: horror at the idea that doctors might think of murder (the charge of attempted murder is of course unproven) side by side with an acceptance of the murder of up to 1 million Iraqis and Afghans by the coalition forces. Is dropping a 1-ton bomb on people from a great height less obscene than attempting to kill a relatively small number of people (if that was in fact the intention - again, not proven) by ramming a vehicle into the airport building? How much horror has been expressed by politicians and the mainstream media at the routine, almost daily, killing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank - some 5,000 or so since the first intifada? The fact is that we cannot trust either politicians, the media, or our security services to tell us the truth; on the contrary, we must assume until it is proven otherwise that they are peddling disinformation designed to maintain the spurious 'war on terror'. We are in serious trouble when intelligent commentators simply accept at face value what is given by official sources.

Richard Page

12 July 2007 - 10:41pm

I usually expect some sign that contributers have actually read the article they are responding to; in this case I am clearly wrong. Michael Thieren writes a lucid piece about the history and idea of the 'evil doctor'; clearly jdubow and Paul Carline were reading something else. Maybe they can provide links to the articles they were responding to?

dajudem

13 July 2007 - 8:12pm

It is clear that Jdbow read the article as he addressed it clearly in his first paragraph. "Michel Thieren has crafted an oh so gentle and reasonable apologia for the doctors who betrayed their profession, their society and the country that welcomed them." Any article is more than simply the logic expressed therein. It is a feeling the article gives us as a whole, based on the language used... There are "flavors" that create a certain bigger picture. That is why some people can read an article and simply feel inclined to refute it, while others can read the same article and go out and kill someone. In fact the article is not simply about "history and the idea of the 'evil doctor'". Therien's first paragraph brings up this comment for discussion: ""To generalise about an event like this and think that Muslim doctors generally should have a different kind of treatment or perception in a negative way should not be the issue here", he said." Indeed he asks this question himself: "is there a special emotional charge connected to the evidence that there could be Muslim doctors who commit terrorist acts, and if so, why?" He apologises, as Jdbow points out, by first bringing up all sorts of other doctors to compare these Islamic ones to, thus implying that these Muslim doctors are no worse than other doctors. Then he makes this assertion, "the physicians of the Muslim empire never compromised medical excellence to accommodate the theological doxa of their time..." to suggest that perhaps they are even better than Western doctors. Finally he comments that "Evil medicine" is nothing but the ideological reappropriation of medical science..." Thus finally coming to the "oh so gentle and reasonable apologia" that Jdbow took umbrage with. I agree completely. As for Carline, his apologetics are based on the idea that since the bombs were poorly done and didn't kill anyone, that they should be dismissed... I was looking for something in your response that indicated that you yourself had read the article that yourself complained that others did not.

jdubow

13 July 2007 - 1:39am

Regarding the assertion by Richard Page that neither Mr. Carline nor I read the article I can assure you that I did in fact read it in detail. I disagreed with the directions he took and his tacit assumptions. Since I was responding to an article and not writing one I had limited space to both quote and refute his points. My essential points are that:: 1. People are responsible for their own behavior. No matter what else is going on a person, unless compelled at gunpoint, has choices and these choices can't be negated by appeals to history or the acts of others: 2. Doctors, like lawyers and other professionals, have an added degree of responsibility because of the powers and resources given them by society and that their turning to mass murder is even worse than others committing the same crime: 3. Justice delayed is justice denied and hence burying justice and responsibility in a sea of FUD as it seemed that Michel Thieren was doing adds to the problem. After reading his article the impressions left were the usual obfuscations of "You gotta understand" and "not much can be done". My alternative was to say that his main goals of not blaming Muslims or Doctors would be for both ot those groups to assure the public of their ongoing committments to service by speaking out against these individuals and taking appropriate actions. 4 Noting that there were other bad doctors in the West is logically equivalent to saying "see other people are doing the same thing" , which is not a legal defense in a court. Similarly, to point out that doctors aren't aware enough to know the difference between Al Queda like killing and saving lives only increases public unease because the public can't be sure which personality will show up when they see muslim doctors, and people have a natural aversion to playing "you bet your life" with their medical service providers. If those points don't go right to the heart of what Thieren's article then I don't know what does. Regarding Paul Carline, I think he makes a very good point in noting that we need to avoid jumping to conclusions based on incomplete evidence. While I share some of his cynicism about government I also haven't heard the alleged conspirators denying the allegations either. Finally, I don't understand his comment that you can't mix liquid explosives on an airplane. If you can mix them and prepare them on the ground you should be able to do the same on an airplane. The key difference is pressure in the cockpit. What else would prevent bomb making?

Richard Page

13 July 2007 - 11:37am

Clearly the problem is not in the 'reading' but in the 'understanding' Item 1. At no stage did the article assert that people are not responsible for their behaviour Item 2, No value judgement was made in the article between different classes of 'mass murderers', merely an assertion, backed up by facts, that there is a long history of doctors involved in all sorts of criminal behaviour. Item 3 At no stage in the article was comprehension associated with 'nothing can be done'. This was a lucid analysis without the racial and religious overtones that we suffer from in the UK media. Item 4 The assertion that doctors both East (Turkey) and West have a history was by way of introduction to the meat of the article and not offered as a 'defence'. Where your assertion that he suggested that 'doctors aren't aware enough to know the difference between Al Queda like killing and saving lives' comes from I have no idea. Can I suggest a course in English comprehension?

yanuarius

13 July 2007 - 11:52am

The most dangerous terrorist in Indonesia also an intellectual, he is a Ph.D holder in Chemistry named Dr.Azhahari-Malaysian citizen. But his members came from lower formal education. I think there is no significant correlation between education (doctor etc) with terrorism.

jdubow

13 July 2007 - 8:41pm

I would like to thank dajudem for his supportive reply. I couldn't have said it better myself, and even if I could have said it as well it is better for another to say so than for me. I thought I would add a few comments regarding specifics. The quote below, taken from the article, is where I developed the opinion that Thieren suggests that the doctors weren't aware enough to separate propaganda from their vows as physicians: "Physicians may not possess all the social endurance needed to recognize and appraise ideological rhetoric when it comes." This, along with the preceding sentences, argue that physicians in general may be more susceptible to Al Queda-like propaganda. Regarding his suggestion that nothing be done was gleaned from little tidbits strewn throughout the article such as those quoted below: "In this light, an appropriate attitude towards the events of 29-30 June 2007 in Britain would be to impose interpretative restraint - by acknowledging that an all-pervasive religious ideology has the power to "call to arms" its most educated supporter...." The second part of this statement contradicts the statement about avoiding Islamophobia preceding it by stating that "an all-pervasive religious ideology can call to arms its most educated supporters. Taken at face value, this means that, when engaging a muslim professional, you can never be sure who or what will be showing up. Earlier on he adds some comments that reveal an apologetic, you can't hold them responsible attitude. : "The prevention of simplistic generalization is more important than digging deep into the mystery of "evil doctors". and "The use of medical knowledge in terror's agenda does not necessarily spring from Islamism. The darkest times of medicine can be found far from today's United Kingdom. The 20th century in Europe is the era of genocide....." . Why is he making these statements? Surely the 20th century in Europe needs be characterized by a lot more than genocide. His citing of Western and Turkish atrocities is a by now well known rhetorical trick to instill guilt and shame in a person questioning a real world present day crime and deflecting focus on said crime. Try using something like this on a judge or on a police officer pulling you over. In summary, when reading an article the semantics (meaning and implications) are just as important as the syntax (the words and grammar). To be a strong minded and independent citizen one has to be able to put two and two together as well as add two plus two.

halla

13 July 2007 - 10:16pm

Evil doctors" are, then, none other than the few who - for whatever ideological or behavioural reasons - have lost their soul as humans. kervorkian had his reasons for his behavior and saw 'justice' in them. the nazi doctors had reasons found under the aegis of nazism and saw 'justice' in them. the death doctors had reasons found under the aegis of islam and found 'justice' in them. bernard lewis: "In the Islamic world, from the beginning, Islam was the primary basis of both identity and loyalty. We think of a nation subdivided into religions. They think, rather, of a religion subdivided into nations. It is the ultimate definition, the prime definition and the one that determines, as I said, not only identity, but also basic loyalty" to summarily dismiss the common element, (islam) binding the identiy of the "doctors" under a politically correct mantra of pluralism über alles is wrong. especially when one considers the fact that islamic mothers have sent young sons/daughters to die with their bodies wrapped in rat poisoned nails and explosives citintg islamic verse.

suziq

15 July 2007 - 5:45am

Without knowing the personal motives of these doctors outside of martyrdom in the name of Allah, I will say that I was very good friends with a woman who married a Muslim doctor - he knew all the right places to beat her without leaving marks... I think you will want to see this website: The Truth About Islam http://islamwatchers.blogspot.com

jdubow

15 July 2007 - 7:45pm

I was so aghast I didn't know what was the worst part of the website suggested by suziq, but the piece by Wafa Sultan towards the bottom of the page was a breath of much needed fresh air. Some other articles on that site were, in the context of terror doctors, very troubling. Robert Sidley, writing in the Halifax news discusses the mind set needed to make doctors into killers. The next three paragraphs are quoted from Sidley ."Cooper draws on the thought of Eric Voegelin, a political philosopher who coined the term pneumopathological to describe those who prefer "to project a kind of daydream than to understand the world." "Such people dwell psychologically in what Voegelin called a "second reality." Pneumopathology is a form of spiritual madness, a state of mind that regards violence as "a magic instrument capable of transfiguring reality." The idea of a "second reality" refers not to the terrorist's goal, but to a psychological (or spiritual) reality that allows him to regard the carnage he causes as necessary to achieving his utopian dream. "The terroristic act as a moralistic model is a symptom of the disease in which evil assumes the form of spirituality," Cooper says. They (the doctors), too, must have imagined themselves empowered by divine sanction. You don't shout "Allah, Allah" when your flesh is burning unless something else consumes your mind." In a related article in the International Herald Tribune today Hassan Fattah writes that, under Islam, it is the best educated and often Doctors and Engineers that lead the charge against the West, specifically: "But increasingly, analysts and researchers say, the region's engineering and medical schools have become hotbeds of political and Islamist activity. Many Arab doctors, in turn, have led the charge against American, Israeli and Western actions in the region, building on their time-honored roles as community leaders. "The doctor at one time or another presented a figure who could really decide life and death," said Sari Nasser, professor of sociology at the University of Jordan. "Now doctors have this tradition that they have to lead people and not to let them down. This is one reason why doctors as such are leading the fight against the West." This last quote is truly the scariest in the whole exchange on this page, because it implies that Islamist doctors are much more common than even the most pessimistic amongst us believe. It gives the lie to Michel Thieren's assertion (wish? prayer? deceit??, who knows) that Terror Doctors are a void concept. As with any disease or pathological condition, ignoring it just increases the price.