“I can’t believe my son is a fanatic,” says the father of Dr. Mohammed Asha, one of the rage-filled terrorists who tried to disrupt daily life in Britain last week.
“My son is incapable of such acts,” said Dr Asha’s father Jamil Abdelkader Asha from his modest home in Amman, Jordan.
“My son was happy in Britain, he was always telling us. He didn’t feel he was the brunt of any negative sentiment as an Arab or a Muslim, on the contrary.
“And he is not the type to get involved in political issues – at university he wasn’t even a member of any student unions. He is a devout Muslim like the rest of us, but he is not extremely religious. He didn’t have time for religion because he was always studying.”
Obviously, the senior Mr. Asha didn’t see the 1999 movie My Son the Fanatic:
Synopsis: A Pakistani cab driver and a prostitute find their lives complicated when his Islamic Fundamentalist son decides to “clean up” their town [in Britain].
The movie, which does not have a happy ending, or even a resolution, came out in 1999—well before 9/11 and well before Iraq, which Andrew Sullivan tries to label as a “proximate cause” of the latest incidents involving Rage Boys in Britain.
Abdulla is clearly a Sunni, angered at US and UK support of Shia in Iraq. This paradigm reveals the real danger of our further enmeshment in a Muslim civil war: we can turn one or both sides against us. The imperative to get out before this compounds itself as a problem is urgent.
Sure, sure—let’s get out of Iraq. And let the Israelis get out of Israel. And then let’s us get out of Britain, too, while we’re at it, because they don’t like having us there, either.
