Indoctrination Central

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you will remember my recent posting of a couple of vids featuring Irshad Manji in one of which she blows apart the tired old meme about poverty being the root cause of radicalisation.

Well, another of my favourite bloggers has just done the same thing.

"They never had a choice, right? Never mind that 9/11 bomber Mohamad Atta was an engineer. Never mind OBL is a bratty son of rich people. Never mind Ayman Zawahiri is a physician. To the media, they are innocents left with no choice but violence by a wicked U.S."

[---]

"The writer tells us that the Jordanian's wife, who is proud of her murderer husband, is the author of a book that compares OBL to Che Guevara. Actually Che had lots in common with OBL and Zawahiri. He, too, was a physician and the son of well-to-do parents. But he was not the man who Appelbaum appears to think he was. To most people, Che was the guy on the poster in college dorm rooms. But in real life, he was a cold-blooded killer. When his thugs did not have the courage to shoot someone, Che took the gun from them and killed the victim. Oh yeah, he was a real believer in first do no harm."

[---]

"She fails to notice that the reason most people don't hear counter arguments is because journalists such as herself are too caught up in the Muslim-as-victim argument. The U.S. is the big monster that takes innocent lambs and turns them into killers. So yes, Balawi conned the CIA and the Jordnanian intelligence, but he and his ilk have been conning the western intellectuals for decades."

Yup. None of these guys lacked the means to get themselves a good education with plenty of marketable skills. In fact, they did just that. That just doesn't happen for the real people who live under the crushing weight of poverty. Most of them don't get much of an education at all, except maybe in madrassas. About the only thing we can say about them is that they are, as a result of their lack of education, vulnerable to indoctrination by the educated ones both in their own societies and here in Western society. I'm thinking Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are chiefs among their indoctrinators, especially in our own society. A day doesn't go by that I don't spit in their general direction.