Jihadistene er ikke sosiale tilfeller. De kommer heller ikke fra madrassaene i Pakistan, men er høyt utdannede muslimer som har levd i Vesten, skriver reiseforfatteren William Dalrymple.
Han synes omtalen av madrassene er unyansert, og sier bare 15 prosent prediker voldelig jihad. Men 15 prosent er mange, og nesten alle er meg konservative. De skaper et miljø hvor de ekstreme ikke skiller seg ut.
De unge som er farlige for vestlige samfunn, er de som har vokst opp i Vesten, eller fått sin utdannelse der.
The men who planned and carried out the Islamist attacks on America were confused, but highly educated, middle-class professionals. Mohammed Atta was a town planning expert; Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s chief of staff, is a paediatric surgeon; Omar Sheikh, the kidnapper of Daniel Pearl, is the product of the same British public school that produced the film-maker Peter Greenaway.
Peter Bergen of Johns Hopkins University recently published the conclusions of his in-depth study of 75 Islamist terrorists who had carried out four major anti-western attacks. According to Bergen, “53% of the terrorists had either attended college or had received a college degree. As a point of reference, only 52% of Americans have been to college.” Against this background, the backgrounds of the British bombers should not come as a surprise.
The French authority on Islamists, Gilles Kepel, has arrived at a similar conclusion. The new breed of global jihadis, he writes, are not the urban poor of the third world - as Tony Blair still claims - so much as “the privileged children of an unlikely marriage between Wahhabism and Silicon Valley”. Islamic terrorism, like its Christian predecessor, re2_kommentars a largely bourgeois endeavour.
Interessante poeng. Mindre interessant er Dalrymples videre utlegning; at det gjelder om å forstå jihadistene politisk hvis man ønsker å tørrlegge sumpen de trives i.