When healers become killers: the doctor as terrorist

What needs to be understood is the intersection of ideology and theology. The intellectual class is often the source of radicalism. Socialism, philosopher Friedrich Hayek noted, did not begin as a working-class movement. It was a "construction" of "second-hand dealers in ideas," including "professional men and technicians, such as scientists and doctors." [Sayyid Qutb], who studied in the United States in the 1940s, hated the West. American men were interested only in "money-grubbing and exploitation." The women were worse. "The American girl," Qutb wrote in The America I Have Seen, "knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs - and she shows all this and does not hide it." Political philosopher Eric Voegelin coined the term pneumopathological to describe those who indulge in psychological fantasies rather than understand the world in its reality. Such people dwell in a "second-order reality." This "reality" doesn't refer to particular goals, but rather to a state of mind that allows them to regard mass murder as a magical tool for reordering the world.