Think about this !!!

A few years ago I was visiting Bahrain and sitting
with friends in a fish restaurant when news appeared
on an overhead TV about Muslim terrorists, men and
women, who had taken hostages in Russia. What struck
me, though, was the instinctive reaction of the
Bahraini businessman sitting next to me, who muttered
under his breath, "Why are we in every story?" The
"we" in question was Muslims.

The answer to that question is one of the most
important issues in geopolitics today: Why are young
Sunni Muslim males, from London to Riyadh and Bali to
Baghdad, so willing to blow up themselves and others
in the name of their religion? Of course, not all
Muslims are suicide bombers; it would be ludicrous to
suggest that.

But virtually all suicide bombers, of late, have been
Sunni Muslims. There are a lot of angry people in the
world. Angry Mexicans. Angry Africans. Angry
Norwegians. But the only ones who seem to feel
entitled and motivated to kill themselves and totally
innocent people, including other Muslims, over their
anger are young Sunni radicals. What is going on?

Neither we nor the Muslim world can run away from this
question any longer. This is especially true when it
comes to people like Muhammad Bouyeri - a Dutch
citizen of Moroccan origin who last year tracked down
the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a critic of Islamic
intolerance, on an Amsterdam street, shot him 15 times
and slit his throat with a butcher knife. He told a
Dutch court on the final day of his trial on Tuesday:
"I take complete responsibility for my actions. I
acted purely in the name of my religion."

Clearly, several things are at work. One is that
Europe is not a melting pot and has never adequately
integrated its Muslim minorities, who, as The
Financial Times put it, often find themselves "cut off
from their country, language and culture of origin"
without being assimilated into Europe, making them
easy prey for peddlers of a new jihadist identity.

Also at work is Sunni Islam's struggle with modernity.
Islam has a long tradition of tolerating other
religions, but only on the basis of the supremacy of
Islam, not equality with Islam. Islam's self-identity
is that it is the authentic and ideal ex-pression of
monotheism. Muslims are raised with the view that
Islam is God 3.0, Christianity is God 2.0, Judaism is
God 1.0, and Hinduism is God 0.0.

Part of what seems to be going on with these young
Muslim males is that they are, on the one hand,
tempted by Western society, and ashamed of being
tempted. On the other hand, they are humiliated by
Western society because while Sunni Islamic
civilization is supposed to be superior, its decision
to ban the reform and reinterpretation of Islam since
the 12th century has choked the spirit of innovation
out of Muslim lands, and left the Islamic world less
powerful, less economically developed, less
technically advanced than God 2.0, 1.0 and 0.0.

"Some of these young Muslim men are tempted by a
civilization they consider morally inferior, and they
are humiliated by the fact that, while having been
taught their faith is supreme, other civilizations
seem to be doing much better," said Raymond Stock, the
Cairo-based biographer and translator of Naguib
Mahfouz. "When the inner conflict becomes too great,
some are turned by recruiters to seek the sick
prestige of 'martyrdom' by fighting the allegedly
unjust occupation of Muslim lands and the 'decadence'
in our own."

This is not about the poverty of money. This is about
the poverty of dignity and the rage it can trigger.

One of the London bombers was married, with a young
child and another on the way. I can understand, but
never accept, suicide bombing in Iraq or Israel as
part of a nationalist struggle. But when a British
Muslim citizen, nurtured by that society, just
indiscriminately blows up his neighbors and leaves
behind a baby and pregnant wife, to me he has to be in
the grip of a dangerous cult or preacher - dangerous
to his faith community and to the world.

How does that happen? Britain's Independent newspaper
described one of the bombers, Hasib Hussain, as having
recently undergone a sudden conversion "from a British
Asian who dressed in Western clothes to a religious
teenager who wore Islamic garb and only stopped to say
salaam to fellow Muslims."

The secret of this story is in that conversion - and
so is the crisis in Islam. The people and ideas that
brought about that sudden conversion of Hasib Hussain
and his pals - if not stopped by other Muslims - will
end up converting every Muslim into a suspect and one
of the world's great religions into a cult of death