Physician, Heal Thyself
Facing a shortage of medical personnel, it seems only sensible to bring aboard those with qualifications received through their medical training abroad. Who is to say that a doctor or a surgeon trained in Syria, in India or Pakistan, or Bangladesh, isn't as well prepared to serve the public health as those trained in Europe, or North America, after all? If there are any doubts, there are qualifying examinations and medical board interviews for validation.And then the country, hungry with the need for additional doctors and surgeons to treat its under-serviced population can beg, borrow or entice medical professionals from abroad to trade in their places of residence and their licenses to practise. After all, it's no big secret that well trained professionals migrating hopefully to other countries find themselves unable to practise their professions because of differing standards and occupational professional jealousy.
These professionals whose skills and services are badly required in the countries to which they emigrate, illogically will find themselves delivering pizza or driving taxis to make ends meet and support their families in their new, and disappointing environment. The opportunities to practise and to succeed they so hoped to find have been denied them, and they suppress their misery and make herculean efforts to increase their language and professional qualifying skills.
And here is Great Britain, doing the right thing, bringing in medical professionals from abroad and actually utilizing their talents and skills for the good of the country. How enlightened and progressive. That's Britain; always leading the way, doing the right thing. Somehow, coming up short, like the unvetted Imams trained in Arab countries and brought in to preach their Arabic-language messages of Koranic hatred against the West, Jews and Christianity in London-area mosques.
And so it was with medical professionals trained in the Arab world, all welcomed into Britain's National Health Service. No, they cannot possibly, the eight thus far brought into custody, represent the totality of those medical professionals whose credentials were brought into Britain from abroad. But they do very well represent the potential dangers in blind trust, particularly given the no-holds-barred nature of the danger presented to the West of late by al Qaeda and its fervent supporters.
That old bromide that education and enlightenment will solve all ills, is being put to rest. It is not, as it happens, the downtrodden, the alienated and the desperately poor whose burning ambition it becomes to seek revenge we need fear as the identified threat, but rather those earnest believers turned fanatic jihadists whose backgrounds represent academic achievement and economic entitlement.
Which is exactly what Oriana Fallaci pointed out, and no one would hear her. According to one who should know by close observation and academic credentials, when speaking of the radicalism of Arabs living in the Palestinian Territories: (Dr. Steven Plaut, Professor on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Haifa.)
"There is an inverse relationship between the material comfort of Arabs living under Israeli rule and political moderation. The better off they are in a material sense, the more violent and radical they are. More generally, Arab radicalism and terror are positively correlated with comfort and education and wealth. Bin Laden and his people are filthy rich. There have been no undernourished Palestinian suicide bombers. Many have been college students."And there we have it; the suspected al Qaeda terrorists who galvanized British security and police into action were almost all foreign-trained doctors, working within the British health care system. Six are young men from the Middle East; another, arrested in Australia is also a foreign-educated physician. One is a neurosurgeon from Jordan, his disbelieving father fled Palestine in 1948 for Jordan.
The two attacks, one in London, the other in Scotland, tell Britain it must look not only for home-born jihadists, suicide-martyrs, but fervently devout intellectual-physicians, 'just visiting'. And isn't it quite wonderful that Canada's own Momin Kawaja, being held on a Security Certificate on charges of terrorism because of his links with a London-based terror cell, and who was working on perfecting a remote detonating device, and who comes from a privileged background, living in Ottawa, has a tangential connection to all of this.
For it would appear that the would-be doctor-bombers were tracked down by the police through their cellphones; clues gathered from cellphones, meant to act as detonators. The devices, apparently, failed, and enabled detectives to track the calls in the successful identification of suspects. And then there is London's Automatic Numberplate Recognition programme with cameras clicking on motor license plates to produce the city's "Ring of Steel".
Evidently, there is no higher mission in life than to be a healer. That is, for most intelligent, responsible and reasonably sane individuals. If you're impressionable, albeit educated, and become a religious fanatic, succumbing to the lure of Islam's promise to martyrs for the cause, that higher mission is subverted, from saving lives to taking them, indiscriminately, horribly, triumphantly.
Labels: Religion, Terrorism, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, July 03, 2007
<< Home