I have issues with Clive Cookson’s article “Value the ‘great Arab doctor’ ” over on the Financial Times website.

His commentary is about the recent terror incidents in the UK, when a group including several doctors — all from outside Britain — attempted to detonate two car bombs in London and drove a Jeep into the terminal at Glasgow Airport.

Cookson makes a few interesting points and gets off to a relatively good start, followed by this in the second paragraph:

(I)t is naive for the world in general to imagine that the medical profession somehow contains “better” people who are less likely to kill for a cause than those in other walks of life.

I’m not sure if the world really does imagine this given the legacy of men such as Josef Mengele, but I agree it would be naive to do so. No profession can claim its members are all on the straight and narrow.

Then the article falls down:

Once one accepts that violent revolutionaries may come from relatively prosperous backgrounds, then doctors are an obvious recruiting ground for extremism – particularly in the Middle East, where medicine has long been one of the largest and most prestigious professions. The great tradition of Islamic medicine, established during the Middle Ages, still resonates today in the Arab world.

WTF? “An obvious recruiting ground for extremism”? That’s a seriously big jump. I have no idea how he is linking a career’s prestige with extremist viewpoints. Surely a more obvious “recruiting ground” would be a university, where young people feeling lonely or lost in the milieu can be swept up with a cause that gives them purpose. I think the real key to this paragraph is “largest”: it’s logical to assume that a large base will throw up a greater number of oddballs. It does not mean the profession itself is attracting or breeding them.

His use of geography to illustrate this point baffles me even further — if such a “prestigious” profession can inspire violence then surely the same is true in most regions, not just the Middle East. (On a historial note I take issue with his use of the term “Middle Ages” in relation to Islam; it’s an imprecise term more suited to European history.)

The article then makes reference to medicine’s “long history of involvement in revolutionary violence”, with reference to Joseph Guillotin (for whom the execution device is named) in the French Revolution and Che Guevara.

Even more relevant to the events of the past week is the leadership provided by physicians in the Arab world’s revolutionary movements of the late 20th century. George Habash, a paediatrician from a Christian Palestinian background, founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which became notorious for hijacking aircraft in the early 1970s. Several senior figures in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, including Mahmoud Zahar, Abdel Aziz Rantisi and Mohammed al-Hindi, trained in medicine.

There’s trained in, and then there’s practicing. Habash was not working as a doctor (unlike most of the men in the British incidents) when he became involved with extremism, although I can’t speak about the others referred to above.

I’m not sure if “leadership” by physicians is relevant; Michael Collins was a civil servant and adept bookkeeper, Castro studied law and Mao was an assistant librarian at one point. Are we to think of these professions as being potential hotbeds of revolution? If a civil servant leads a coup d’etat somewhere in the world, are we immediately going to point to Michael Collins as his antecedent?

With hindsight, what is more surprising than the involvement of doctors in a terrorist plot is their incompetence in carrying it out. Doctors are practical people, with a scientific training, who might have been expected to explode a car bomb successfully

Not necessarily. As French anti-terror expert Dominique Thomas has said: “You can find videos on the Internet from Iraq on how to booby-trap a car. But carrying it out is not as simple as people might think.” (And if you want to know about incompetence in carrying out terror activities, read Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA — and those people were supposedly serious terrorists.)

The young men from humble backgrounds who carried out the July 7 attacks in 2005 were more effective suicide bombers than the two professionals who drove a vehicle laden with petrol and gas cylinders into the Glasgow airport terminal.

Since when does professionalism equate to “superior terrorist”? I refer you to the above quote from Thomas. I also refer you to this AFP article, where various analysts make it clear that these doctors were unlikely to have been trained in terror activities.

It’s unfortunate that the point of Cookson’s commentary is left to the very end. After referring to anecdotal evidence of patients “cancelling medical appointments with doctors who have Arab or Islamic-sounding names”, he writes:

Any loss of public confidence in Arab or Muslim doctors – and discriminatory measures that would make it harder for physicians to come to work in Britain from the Middle East than from other parts of the world – would be a tragedy for the NHS. There are still “great Arab doctors” working in Britain today and, if we encourage them, there will be more in future generations.

Which is a very, very good point. The wrongs of a few tearaways should not be visited upon their countrymen. Unfortunately humans are fucked up in this regard and tend to tar everyone with the same brush. Will we ever learn?

Am I making valid critiques of an otherwise very good journalist, or has he just caught me on a bad day? I invite your comments.

by