What makes a doctor become a terrorist? By Michael Burleigh The presence of a medical doctor in a terrorist camp should not surprise us. In other Syrian jihadi camps you can find a Tennessee-trained Saudi dentist, a French-Moroccan physiotherapist from Paris, and a medical student from Tunisia. The current leader of Al Qaeda is Egyptian eyesurgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took over from Osama Bin Laden after he was killed. Likewise, one of the founding leaders of the Palestinian terror group Hamas was paediatrician Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who after hisdeath in an Israeli air strike in 2004, was replaced by Mahmoud al-Zahar — an Egyptian-trained surgeon. When we go further back, to the Marxist-Leninist terrorists of the Seventies, we find DrGeorge Habbash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — who was a pensioner in Syria and died in Jordan in 2008. Then there is Dr Waddi Haddad of a Popular Front faction, among whose exploits was the 1975 attack on the OPEC meeting in Vienna, where several oil ministers were taken hostage by Carlos the Jackal, then the world’s most wanted terrorist.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Aug 2013 20:17:03 +0000
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