The mild-mannered suicide bomber

"He was a normal young kid like all his peers..."

"We still don't believe what happened. He is very well- mannered. Neither he nor any of his family smoke even,

Bashandi was "a man with almost no friends, who spent a lot of time in the mosques and was particularly affected by his father’s death in September 2004..."

It amazes me that people can still view this person in the same way they view the 19 highjackers on 9/11 who were clean shaven, smiled a lot, wore jeans and seem to blend right in with Americans. This guy seemed to follow "peaceful" Islam and could not have been a threat.

How many Muslims living in America meet that exact description...

Moose

So this guy is a "typical" young man from Egypt?

THAT is the message?

Great.

How reassuring.

What can we expect from the extremists, then?

A few excerpts from various sources in the article above:

"...a quiet, soft-spoken young man."

"He was a normal young kid like all his peers..."

"...a normal kid, very polite but secluded. He didn’t mingle much with people..."

"...particularly affected by his father’s death in September 2004."

"...his attitude changed after his father's death."

"We never felt that or noticed any changes in his attitude."

What this shows, yet again, is that terrorists, in murdering Infidels, do not necessarily start out as fire-breathers. They may, in outward aspect, seem to be just like any "normal young kid." But that "normal young kin" is a normal young Muslim kid -- and that makes all the difference.

Indeed, they need not have been concealing, all this time, a particularly fervent and murderous faith at all -- as some have implied happenswith such people as Raed al-Banna who, at least one commentator suggests, could easily have been concealing his real views.

That could happen. It is likely that rising high in various Western governments are Muslim moles, concealing their real feelings until such time as they are able to exploit their positions, or perhaps even now exploiting them. But there is a much larger problem. It is not the fervent Muslim who is hiding his fervency. It is the Muslim who is not fervent, but for whom changes in his personal life -- including the death of his father -- can transform the merely observant into the fanatic, and the killer.

And if Muslims themselves, in Iraq, in Israel, in Egypt, in Morocco, in Tunisia, in Algeria, and elsewhere, have expressed great surprise, not in all but in many cases, at the son or brother who ended up as a suicide killer, how much more difficult, how impossible, really, for Infidels, innocent of Muslim ways, innocent of the fantastic ability to conceal, confused by Muslim apologetics and rhetoric, disinclined to see the scope or nature of the menace because to recognize it is simply too upsetting (and this happens all the time, individually, and collectively, about all sorts of matters).

Shall all Muslims be monitored for sudden changes in their personal lives? Shall we have a National Register to record when someone's father or mother dies, when a child becomes mortally ill, a husband or wife leaves, a job is lost, a stock investment sours, or bipolar disorder sets in -- for every last Muslim?

Of course we cannot. We must recognize that with the System of Islam already accepted, any Believer might, potentially, be set off by these purely personal setbacks. Apologists for Islam keep stressing the idiotic idea that Muslims behave as they do only because of perceived injustice by the "colonialist" or "imperialist" West. You know what the Arabs and Muslims mean --they mean such outrages as the United States of America being so busy stealling all of Iraq's oil (yes, so far the American government has made how many hundreds of billions on its imperialist venture in Iraq?), not to mention stealing all of Saudi Arabia's oil, and don't forget that Great Israeli Empire that stretches a full 8 miles from Kalkilya to the Mediterranean.

Through the prism of Islam, one views the Universe as divided into two camps: the Believers and the Infidels. It does not matter if the Infidels are white or black, rich or poor, whether they have resuced you from a tyrant, or are helpless villagers who want only to farm. It does not matter if they are Infidel Americans in the United States, or in Iraq, or walking down a street to see a tourist site in Cairo or Beirut. It does not matter if they are Hindus celebrating a wedding in Kashmir, or a poor tiffin-wallah who happens to be walking by a mosque at the end of Friday Prayers in Dacca, who is then beaten to death by the excited worshippers, eager to take care of at least one Hindu that day. It does not matter if those Infidels happen to be Dinka and Nuer tribesmen in the south of the Sudan, who never posed a threat to the Arabs who have over the past century, from being a mere 10% of the country, slowly been taking it over, demographically and geographically. It does not matter whether they are Christian villagers who are ethnically identical, in northern Nigeria, or in the Moluccas, or the southern Philippines, or whether those villagers are Buddhists in southern Thailand. All that matters is that they are Infidels, non-Muslims, and they can be targetted for any reason -- or no reason.

Not all Muslims feel their Islam in that way. But we, the Infidels, cannot detect who receives Islam in what way, and we also have no way of detecting the changes, over time, that can occur for no other reason than personal ones. Mohammad Atta felt keenly his loss of status, and the usual graduate student angst, and loneliness, while in Hamburg -- and all of that led him to more, and more fanatical, Islam. It was his consolation. Ayman al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden were children of very prominent and rich families, but had always taken their religious obligations more seriously, and their disgust at the circumambient society necessarily had to take on a religious cast, had to locate the enemy not in the corruption and swinish behavior of the Egyptian and Saudi elites, but in Infidels, and by attacking those elites for being, precisely, insufficiently Islamic, and tied to the Infidels.

When will this government, when will other Western governments, when will the press, manage to understand that ideas matter, and that Islam is essentially an idea, a very primitive Idea, but an Idea, a geopolitical Idea, whatever its bits and pieces of pagan Arab lore, and stories appropriated in distored fashion from Judaism and Christianity?

These ideas must be taken seriously. One cannot blandly assert that "only a few" Muslims are a problem. How does one know this? How does one know which Muslim, perhaps both outwardly and inwardly content with his life, will never prove susceptible, not to some wild extra-Islamic doctrine, but to Islam itself? All the technological "progress" that has been made has helped to dry up those pockets of innocent village Islam, where illiterate peasants go to a ramshackle mosque, are pious, content, and no nothing of the outside world. Now those same villagers, like the Iranian peasants who listened to Khomeini's tapes, can see the videocassettes of decaptiations of Nicholas Berg and Kenneth Bigley, and can hear the chants -- Qur'anic chants, warchants, consiting only of Qur'anic verses (nothing made up, for nothing need be made up).

When a single cow is seen to have suffered from "mad-cow" disease, to be infected with the Creuzfeldt-Jacob virus, an entire continent will cease to eat meet, will quarantine hundreds of millions of sheep and cows. If you heard that one out of 10 planes was now a clear safety risk, would you fly? Isn't much of life a calculation of probabilities? Do we not try to minimize risks?

Let us assume that the estimate, given by one , that 10-15% of Muslims are terrorists or potential terrorists. One does not know how this figure is arrived at. Ali Sina and other defectors from Islam, whom I trust, consider it to have the percentages backwards, for they suggest that 85-90% of Muslims might become potential terrorists, or supporters of similar acts, or would be ready to harm non-Muslims in other ways, in the conduct of Jihad. Who knows, really -- and how could we ever be certain? But even the gleeful behavior of masses of Muslims all over the world, after 9/11, or the numbers of people naming their sons "Osama," or the kinds of things routinely said, and applauded, at meetings of Muslim nations, or the kinds of demands made on Infidel societies, by Muslims now livinig in their midst, or the behavior of Muslim pressure groups to limit the power of Infidels to undertake reasonable security measures (including, precisely, profiling to target not a race, or an ethnic group, but the adherents or potential adherents of the ideology of Islam), and the enormous efforts to conduct Da'wa by every conceivable and sly means, including the rewriting of textbooks to transform the history of Infidel lands, and to target the most vulnerable members of society(prisoners, immigrants, schoolchildren) for the conduct of Da'wa -- all of this should give any Infidel who has studied the theory and practice of Islam, considerable pause.

But suppose that the lowest estimate -- 10% of all Muslims -- were in fact somehow true? No, let us make that figure 5% -- only 5% are potential terrorits. Then what? If one out of 20 Muslims allowed into the Western world zensuring the dominance that the ideas of Islam, quite primitive, quite easily summed up, matter to those who are raised up in the faith, or to those who are told to consider themselves Muslims and then, accepting this designation, as they find out more about what Islam really teaches (not all those called Muslims necessarily are fully aware of either its full teachings or of the real history of Muslim conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, and not all realize that has been a vehicle for Arab imperialism, the most successful imperialism in world history) for for years in wait, only feigning to be just one more "normal young kid." They may in fact, inwardly as well as outwardly, be "normal kids" (to use the phrase repeatedly applied to Bashandi in the article above) but not fanatical in their religion. Mohammad Atta was the upper-middle-class son of an Egyptian lawyer. He went off to Hamburg to study, not Islam, but urban planning. He lost status. He was homesick. He may have not excelled in his studies. He had the evidence of a more advanced, superior civilization all around him. He sought solace in the company of fellow Muslims who were also experiencing disappointment, angst, depression. They together found a renewed faith as the answer -- faith in Islam -- with the results we all saw one late-summer morning in 2001.

We have no way of insuring that every single Muslim will forever and ever be immunte to suffering a job loss, the loss of a parent or child, or anyone of the thousand natural shocks that flesh -- even Muslim flesh -- is heir to.

That being the case, it is a matter of obvious prudence to keep Muslims from migrating to the Western world. Let them come to see, if they can, that the problems of their own societies, the political, economic, social, and intellectual failures, that the keenest among them recognize, but still cannot bring themselves to attribute to Islam itself, and still must somehow blame the Infidels (America, Israel, the Pope, it hardly matters). For nearly a thousand years ago, when the non-Muslim populations of Christians and Jews in the Middle East were reduced in numbers, and the remainder no longer a fructifying element, high Islamic civilization came almost entirely to an end. A few Persian astronomers, a few poets who were distinctly non-Islamic in the contents of their verse, a few more mosques. Then, nothing but military might of Seljuk and then Ottoman Turks, and slave-raids, in Africa, and in Western Europe, and in Eastern Europe, and little else-- compared at least to Europe itself,or to China, or to pre-Islamic India, or to the Meso-American civliizations which we keep overlooking.

For more than thousand years those born into Islam were limited in what they might contribute to world civilization (how many artists, scientists, thinkers, might have been produced in the countries subjugated to Islam, and their populations slowly or rapidly islamized, but had no chance to do so because of Islam itself? A mind, or hundreds of millions of minds, are a terrible thing to waste).

Governments put quarantines on cattle and sheep into this country, when only one out of five million may carry a certain virus. Even if the figure of potential terrorists were "only" 10% (and if one trusts the testimony of ex-Muslims, and by "terrorism" means support for warfare against Infidels, then a figure of 90% would be more accurate), we would be mad to continue to allow in, to give citizenship to, such a pool of people.

Far better that the putative "moderates" stay home to deal with, to transform, Islam itself. And if they can't do so? If it proves impossible? Then that is another reason to have cut off all Muslim immigration.

As this case shows, anything at all, including the inevitable death of parents and other relatives, can set someone off. And we cannot know what, when, where. Under such circumstances, prudence demands that the risks be minimized. Infidel governments should not allow their policies to be dictated by fear of offending, or by believing their own absurdities -- no one should continue to mouth the kind of absurdities about the religion of "peace" and "tolerance" that we have had to endure in the past (and Bush's meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah in Crawford this month is a terrible idea, a terrible mistake -- and he, Bush, should either be persuadede to cancel it, or to read Abdullah the Riot Act. Because if he doesn't, then the Riot Act should be read to Bush; the election is over; those who pretended he was beyond criticism no longer feel those inhibitions -- the time for comedy is over).

A telling tale, and a chilling one.

I agree with the shocked neighbors. There's no way such a quiet, well-mannered, conservative, religious guy could do such a thing. Whenever this sort of thing happens, it's a WELL-KNOWN fact that the Mossad/CIA cabal is secretly behind it. They operate out of a secret underground volcanic island base protected by an all-women security force. But everyone knows that.

"They also said on TV something we never heard before, that he recently started to tell his mother that TV is religiously prohibited," al-Sharif told Aljazeera.net...."

Imagine, no Al Jazeera, no satelite dishes, no videos of beheadings, or Bin Liner spouting, or any of them preaching to the faithful on the next continent.....

We may be on to something here.