Understanding the 'incomprehensible'

As Miss Carnivorous points out, a recent AFP article describing airline bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a well-mannered, well-educated individual with a bright future seems at odds with his efforts to kill himself and a large number of total strangers. Abdulmutallab's own family seemed to find it difficult to understand. However,

if one believes this:

"Farouk was a devoted Muslim who took his religion seriously and was committed to his studies,"

why in the world would anyone conclude this:

"He was such a brilliant boy and nobody in the family had the slightest thought he could do something as insane as this"

Experience tells us just the opposite. It is the well-to-do, well-educated devoted Muslims that are most likely to stuff C4 next to their privates, purchase a one way ticket to Detroit, board the plane and detonate in flight, thereby killing themselves and whomever else might be around, in this case 290 innocent bystanders whose loss of life would have been the means by which the young devoted Islamist would have advanced his message of jihad.

I can understand the dolts at homeland security refusing to recognize the obvious - they have been poisoned by a pc ideology that has crippled their ability to think, and stifled their ability to speak. But why would a Nigerian be thus affected? The comments do seem at odds with the fact that his father reported him to the US Embassy and the Nigerian Intelligence Agency a couple of months before the attack.

In a recent address, President Obama has finally made the link betwen the Christmas Day bomber and al-Qaeda:

“We know that [Abdulmutallab] travelled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies,” Obama says. “It appears that he joined an affiliate of al-Qaeda, and that this group, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America.”

Of course, he is nine days late, and his allusion to Yemen poverty reflects his own inability to come to terms wth reality. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was not impoverished. The story of radical Islamist jihad has nothing to do with poverty, and mentioning this irrelevance serves only to cloud the issue.

Miss Carnivorous is correct: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is an Islamist fanatical zealot. We need know nothing more than this to understand the story.

The bad news is, he is not alone, and those that are in charge of our security refer to him simply as ... a Nigerian.