Wish in one hand and bleed into the other, and see which one fills up first
It took getting pumped full of bullets by Al Qaeda for journalist Frank Gardner to realise that the bad guys don’t check your credentials before they try to kill you, because your credentials amount to diddly squat when you’re an infidel:
[I]t crossed my mind how unfair this was. I had spent four years studying Islam for my degree, learning Arabic, reading and translating the Koran and other Islamic texts. I had lived happily among Arab families, fasted with Bedu tribespeople in Jordan, taught English to the impoverished family of an Egyptian taxi driver in a verminous Cairo slum.
For the past few years I had tried hard to explain the complexities of the Middle East and the thinking behind the Al-Qaeda phenomenon to western and international audiences. And this was my reward? A bunch of bullets in the guts from men who had convinced themselves they were killing in the cause of Islam. It just did not seem right.
Funny, that: Barbarians are not ruled by a sense of justice or reason but by fanatacism and irrationality. Who’da thunk it? Now all we need is for Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, and John Pilger to figure this out, one way or another.