On Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple is an atheist who is greatly disturbed by 'the new atheists' (Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, & Hitchens). An interesting though long-winded writer - I had enjoyed his Our Culture, What's Left Of It - he is now engaged in an ongoing war of words with Sam Harris, which makes for fun reading.

For the last few years Dalrymple has often written on Islam and Muslims in the City Journal (a quarterly). So, it was bound to happen that the subject of Terrorism would crop up at some point:

"It’s not just Islam, but the tension between Islam and Western modernity, that makes them tick.

While I was on a visit to Toronto recently, police arrested 17 men, the oldest of them 43 but most much younger, on charges of plotting a terrorist attack. They wished, apparently, to blow up the parliament in Ottawa and publicly behead the prime minister. Cops caught them in the process of buying three times as much material for explosives as Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing. Reporting the arrests, the New York Times called the men “South Asians” — though one of them was an Egyptian, two were Somali, and most had been born in Canada — thus concealing by an inaccurate euphemism the most salient characteristic of the alleged plotters: that they were all Muslims. The Canadian police, emasculated and even stupefied by the exigencies of political correctness (the modern bellwether of virtue), said that the 17 came from such diverse backgrounds that they were unable to discern anything in common among them.

Canadians, on the whole, reacted to news of the plot with a mixture of outrage and disbelief. A few responded more vigorously, smashing the windows of a Toronto mosque, which the press swiftly denounced as un-Canadian. But many wondered, why us? when Canada had been among the most tolerant and accommodating countries to its immigrants in the world, and where celebration of diversity for its own sake had been made almost an official fetish. Could it be that no liberal policy goes unpunished?

It rapidly became clear that no single sociological factor of the kind usually invoked to explain outrageous behavior — poverty, say, or racial discrimination — could explain the adherence of all 17 to the plot (assuming that the charges against them are true). The Somalis involved were born in Somalia in the midst of the chronic civil war there and came to Canada as refugees, where they soon fell into unideological delinquency before catching the Islamist bug; they were not economic success stories. Other alleged plotters, however, emerged from the well-integrated middle classes, such as the son of a successful doctor of Indian origin who had emigrated to Canada from Trinidad. The pictures of the houses in which some of the plotters lived and grew up must have made more than a few newspaper readers envious. Whatever explained the resort of the 17 to the scimitar and the bomb, raw poverty or the hopelessness of insuperable discrimination was not it."

The above are the opening paragraphs in Dalrymple's rather long review of Terrorist - a novel by John Updike. Of course, as an alternative to the review and, possibly in the same amount of time, you could read Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and feel equally bored. However, should any of you decide to read the Updike book, I'd also suggest - preferably instead of it - Doris Lessing's chiling novel The Good Terrorist. Sadly, it is hard to find these days - but try bookshops that sell old books and you may be rewarded.