In ‘From Average Joe to Jihadist,’ Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson shows just how confused he is about the motivations of the London bombers:
“What I don’t understand — and I believe that in order to fight terrorism without quarter and crush it, we’d better try to understand — is what could make someone do what those four men did.
“From what we know or surmise, three of the four suicide bombers were unremarkable young men from the unremarkable city of Leeds in the north of England. They were of Pakistani descent, ordinary citizens of today’s multiethnic Britain. Shehzad Tanweer, according to reports in the British press, was an affable jock whose father owns a neighborhood fish-and-chips shop. Mohammed Sidique Khan was a teaching assistant who gently mentored at-risk kids from troubled homes. Hasib Hussain, a somewhat aimless teenager, loved playing soccer and cricket.?
What happened to these young men? It?s really very simple, Mr. Robinson.
They became followers of radical Islam.
Mona Charen explains:
“Radical Islam,” writes Charen, “is unlike any other modern religion. Imagine being afraid of someone because he had recently become a committed Christian, or Buddhist, or Jew, or Hindu? And indeed, most Muslims around the world are peaceable. But radical Islam is like a throwback to violent cults of mankind?s more primitive past. We know that Aztecs cut the hearts out of young men and women as they offered them to the gods. We know that many early civilizations practiced child sacrifice. People are evidently capable of any atrocity, provided they are convinced that the act is ordained by God — or some substitute for God, like Nazism or communism. And it is a most powerful idea indeed that can induce young, healthy men not just to kill infidels but to kill themselves for the satisfaction of killing infidels.
“We have declared a war on terror, but the critics of this imprecision in language are right. Failing to name the true enemy obscures our task. The enemy is Islamism — the radical interpretation of Islam that sanctions violent jihad, and whose grievances include, to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, the unveiled female face, the existence of the Jews, the existence of Hindus, music, literature, democracy, and nearly everything we hold dear.”