Terrorism & Cancer

Anatomic woodcut by Laurentius Phryesen, 1518

I had this sort of vision the other day. I was looking at the human population as you might look at a human body. We teach ourselves (adults teach children who grow up to become adults teaching children) what we know about how our bodies work, and how about the systems of government work. But outside of school and our ideals, the real world is not quite so clean and well behaved. There is corruption, greed and evil. Likewise in our bodies there are defects, damage and disease. Most of these deviations from the ideal we can live with, but sometimes you encounter a disease that if left untreated will kill you. Sometimes the ability to cure is beyond our power and the disease will kill you anyway. But we keep looking for a way to beat the disease.

Assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881

Sometimes the disease comes about because of some unrecognized microscopic agent. Many devastating diseases have been conquered by the work of the scientific community. Sometimes it took a scientific beating stick to show that the way people were living was unhealthy, like the connection between cholera and the lack of sanitation. You would think people would realize that living in a cesspool was unhealthy, but it took an act of parliament to get the mess cleaned up.

So I look at cancer and terrorism. Both can be devastating. Both can be treated, but we don't really know what is causing either one. We have found that some cancers are caused by viruses, but we don't know why some people are susceptible and some are not. We know there are Islamic fundamentalist schools in Saudi Arabia that indoctrinate students with a belief that the West and Israel are evil and it is their holy duty to destroy them.

Some dude with a gun

I suspect the schools get their impetus from resentment of the Saudi royal family, but I do not know. Wiping out these schools and executing the teachers could put a damper on terrorism, but that might just be putting a lid on it there, causing it to pop up somewhere else. Kind of like cancer. You might be able to excise the parts you can find, but you never know if you got it all, and you still don't know what caused it in the first place.

The part I like (this is sarcasm) is that we send a billion dollars a week to "our friends" in Saudi Arabia in exchange for multiple boat loads of oil. The Saudis support these schools for terrorists, who we supposedly want to stop. If we were really serious about stopping terrorism, we might want to throw a boycott around Saudi Arabia until they squash these schools for martyrs.

From an article by Ted Galen Carpenter that appeared on cato.org on November 16, 2001.

Worst of all, the Saudi monarchy has funded dubious schools and "charities" throughout the Islamic world. Those organizations have been hotbeds of anti-Western, and especially, anti-American, indoctrination. The schools, for example, not only indoctrinate students in a virulent and extreme form of Islam, but also teach them to hate secular Western values.

They are also taught that the United States is the center of infidel power in the world and is the enemy of Islam. Graduates of those schools are frequently recruits for Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terror network as well as other extremist groups.

Kind of old, but I don't know that anything has changed.

But this is beginning to sound a lot like the thought police. And the PC crowd at our Universities. Just what do you believe? Should we burn the heretics at the stake?

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I had been thinking about this for a while, but I was prompted to write about it when I stumbled over this post this morning.