http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2007/07/11/2007-07-11_medical_madmen.html
As we continue to learn the terrifying details of the foiled U.K. bombing plots – and the six doctors allegedly involved in them – some suggest that the notion of Muslim physician-terrorists is a total anomaly, a perversion of not only the medical creed but of the ethic of Islam.
On the first count, they are correct. On the second, the truth is more complicated. Doctors who justify the murder of innocents are disturbingly common in radical Islam. And there’s a case to be made that the Koran itself encourages their crimes.
The London/Glasgow terror suspects are now added to a long list of Muslim physicians who have been prominent jihadists. The apotheosis of this mentality is contemporary jihadist ideologue and mastermind Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri – Osama Bin Laden’s “deputy.” Zawahiri, who is known to be a skilled surgeon, isthe son of Dr. Mohammad Rabi al-Zawahiri, a professor of pharmacology at Ain Shams Medical School in Cairo and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Add to their ranks a long list of physician-radicals. Among them: Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the late Hamas leader, was a pediatrician. Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas’ co-founder – and a hard-liner among hard-liners – is a surgeon. Dr. Fathi Abd al-Aziz Shiqaqi, the late founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad – and one of suicide bombing’s pioneers – trained as a doctor in Egypt.
After the U.K. bombings, some American Muslims – and a group of moderate British Muslims – have sought to distance men likethese from the true message of Islam. Dr. Asma Mobin-Uddin, board chairwoman of the Ohio chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), expressed “outrage” with the doctors, claiming that they are only “professing” to be Muslims. To support this claim, the moderate Muslims refer to a redacted summary of Koran 5:32, which, according to Mobin-Uddin, “equates saving one life with saving the lives of all of humanity.”
That is indeed a faithful quote, but it is an incomplete one. The remainder of Koran 5:32, quoted in full context with the intimately related verse, Koran 5:33, comprises a dire warning to Jews, epitomizing those “who fight against Allah and His Messenger,” and admonishes them to behave, or else:
“(5:32) Our Messengers have already come to them with the clear signs; then many of them thereafter commit excesses in the Earth. (5:33) This is the recompense of those who fight against God and His Messenger, and hasten about the Earth, to do corruption there: they shall be slaughtered, or crucified, or their hands and feet shall alternately be struck off; or they shall be banished from the land.”
Ignoring the incitement to violence in these words is wishful thinking at best and whitewashing at worst. Intellectual honesty, notcontinued Muslim denial and deceit, offers the only hope for initiating a long and difficult recovery from the fully resurgent scourge of jihad.
I do not suggest that we have anything to fear from the vast majority of American doctors whopractice Islam. I do, however, urge all Americans – and Muslims – to look unflinchingly at the Koranic injunctions for war on non-Muslims (9:5; 9:29; 9:111; 47:4), and their embrace by far too many men who call themselves physicians.
Bostom, associate professor of medicine at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School, is author of “The Legacy of Jihad” and “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.”
