Many people have expressed surprise that doctors were involved in Jihad. Beyond that, there seems to be some shock that they did so in such an incompetent manner. They’re doctors! They’re supposed to be smart, right?

Well, with all due respect to my physician readers and commenters, I’ve never bought into that myth. Neither does John Derbyshire:

I attended a British university with a large and famous teaching hospital attached. The medical students were pretty widely regarded as the dumbest on campus, and as the heaviest drinkers and stupidest pranksters. Of the five or six student rock groups, the medics’ was the loudest and worst. (Its name was “Perry Stalsis and his Abdo Men.”) My subsequent experience of doctors has done nothing to erase those early impressions. Sure, medical students have to memorize the names of a lot of little parts. So do auto mechanics.

That’s how I’ve always viewed doctors–as mechanics, except for the human body, rather than inanimate objects.

Not saying, of course, that there aren’t smart doctors, or doctors capable of rigging and detonating explosives via cell phone (but as I’ve noted in the past, fortunately, people competent at doing such things are generally less likely to want to). But there’s certainly no reason to automatically infer high intelligence, or even competence, just because someone is a doctor. Or a lawyer, for that matter.

By the way, it would also be nice if this latest development finally puts to bed the ongoing “progressive” myth that terrorism is caused by poverty and alienation, or by our foreign policy (the latest manifestation of this nonsense is the nutty notion that we are “creating terrorists in Iraq”).

It’s the Jihad, stupid. As a former Islamist notes, we are at war with an ideology:

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy…

…And as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, yesterday on Radio 4’s Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: ‘What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.’

He then refused to acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam.

I left the BJN in February 2006, but if I were still fighting for their cause, I’d be laughing once again. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombings, and I were both part of the BJN – I met him on two occasions – and though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain, our own homeland and abroad, was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would eventually bring Islamic justice to the world.

We continue to deny moral agency to Muslims, and act as though we really are responsible for all bad things in the world, and they have no responsibility for their own behavior. If we don’t understand what we are at war with, and chase after solutions to problems that don’t really exist, and continue to foolishly ask questions like “why do they hate us?”, we can never win.

[Friday morning update]

Diane West has more:

In the media, the effort [to ignore the Islamist elephant in the corner] is misleading to the point of farce. Joel Mowbray, writing at the Powerline blog, noted that the New York Times has identified Britain’s Muslim terrorists as “South Asian people”