After two car bombs failed to explode in London, and a third car crashed in flames into a terminal building at Glasgow Airport, the would-be mass murderers turned out to be radical Muslims.

After two car bombs failed to explode in London, and a third car crashed in flames into a terminal building at Glasgow Airport, the would-be mass murderers turned out to be radical Muslims. No surprise there, though many were shocked to find that almost all of them were doctors. But this should be no surprise either. Muslim cultures encourage technical skills, including medicine, that cannot threaten the regime or the faith (Bashar Assad was trained as an ophthalmologist). Western universities want tuitions, and Western health-care systems want tractable doctors. Some percentage of the men thus collected turned to jihadism to minimize the complexities of life. "He was certainly very angry about what was happening in Iraq," said Shiraz Maher, a British defector from radicalism who met one of the bombers in a jihadist student group. "But to say it was just all about Iraq or foreign policy is mistaken. It feeds off a much wider ideological infrastructure."