Long ago in a place called the Ohio, Americans would get up on the frontier a farmer, by noon be a fur taker, by lunch an elected official and by six a horse trader in all trying to make a living.
There is something missing in that today in career experts investing all they are psychologically and emotionally to give their lives meaning.
In the old days, it used to be everyone wanted to be a Soviet expert and those people had a good run until Reagan gunned down the Soviet system and that really put the careers of allot experts into retirement. This all changed though when 9 11 and terrorism came to the forefront. Then all of a sudden the world was an oyster for people reading the Koran and pretending to either know all about Islam like Bernard Lewis, to have read all and lived among Muslims like Dinesh D'Souza, to have studied all like Robert Spenser, to encompass all like Hugh Fitzgerald or to makes excuses all for Karen Armstrong, sometime nun and all the time antagonist that Jesus the Christ ever lived.
The above make a career of venting or trying to indoctrinate the world to what they view the world to be. It might be bias. It might be ignorance. It might be hatred of the moment or it might be hiding from God, but some information which came to light recently by Thomas Hegghammer in factual data really proves that all of the above know very little about the Islam and Jihad they claim to be experts on.
Mr. Hegghammer in studying 240 biographies of militants found that it was not Islam nor Mosques which turned terrorists into terrorists, but family and friend ties who initiated people into the terrorist network.
None of these people had any religious fervor directed at the world or America for that matter. They instead wanted adventure or to go fight in Chechnya.
It was not until they reached the training camps of bin Laden that they became anti American and went onto the path of terrorism.
All of that shows Lewis, D'Souza, Spenser, Armstrong and Fitzgerald completely educated wrong in pointing the finger at Arabs or Muslims at the heart of Wahabbism. Terrorists became terrorists not out of hate, but out of family and friends who sent them on the road to being brainwashed.
If this information starts being made public, it will be a career ender for all of the above. The other information Hegghammer found was that when America liberated Afghanistan it flushed all of the Saud terrorists back home to Saudi Arabia for mayhem.
For people like Fitzgerald and his associate Robert Spenser who have been extreme in their call for America to get out of Iraq, they are proven completely incorrect in attacking President Bush and the continued chant for "get out of Iraq" for in the crackdown which the President had before had contained terrorists in Iraq, the terrorists are now being flushed out into the entire world for mayhem just like the Saudi's found.
One has to start questioning now if these people are jihad watchers or jihad enablers for their very policies are creating an even larger problem which was contained. In effect, the more the government follows what these "experts" are saying if actually making bigger careers and financial rewards as they have created a bigger problem in death and destruction.
I much prefer the old days in America when people were functional enough to take on new vocations by ingenuity without being so locked in by fame and money which is happening now that too many people from aids researchers to terrorist experts now have a vested interest in maintaining jihad and terror.
It is a sad world we live in where just like drunks and dopers we now have jihad enablers who will not admit to the damage they are doing and have done.
agtG
