‘Those who cure you are going to kill you” were the words of a senior al-Qaeda chief in Jordan to Canon Andrew White, who runs an Anglican church in Baghdad, seemingly in reference to the physician’s plot to kill thousands in England and Scotland.
Chillingly these words identify exactly what most people find so horrifying about this particular terror plot. Doctors are held in esteem in the West -people trust doctors more than almost any other professional. In a world where doctors pledge to use their knowledge to heal, the fact that people with that skill were plotting to kill thousands is especially disturbing.
This is a new face of evil -mass murder carried out by those who cure! The tactic however is not new. We find a similar phenomenon in the Torah portion for the week in which this terror plot was foiled. After the wicked prophet Balaam was unable to undermine the Israelites through cursing them he came up with another plan. The Talmud says (Sanhedrin 106a) that Balaam advised the Moabites to weaken the Israelites at their most vulnerable point. He had observed that the Israeiites were strong in the areas of modesty and sexual morality and he intended to undermine that. If the Moabites would send their young women into the camp of the Israelites and cause them to sin with them this would incur God’s wrath, he advised
This plan worked and one of the senior Israelites leaders was seduced to cohabit with a Moabite princess in public. God brought a swift and deadly plague upon the Israelites -exactly the outcome Balaam had wanted. This is an ancient strategy: when conventional forms of warfare fail, an evil and determined enemy will hurt its adversary in the place where they are most vulnerable.
Britain is a civilized country which honors life and those who maintain it -their doctors. The terrorists have exploited this. This latest al-Qaeda plot was doubly evil because it showed contempt for human life and for those who are meant to protect it. The terrorists realized that no civilized society would suspect a group of doctors of mass murder and therefore they used physicians to plan and carry out their dastardly plot.
The response to this must be similar to that of the Torah to the Moabites. God commanded: ‘Distress the Midianites, and you shall smite them, for they distress you with their plots which they contrived against you in the incident of Peor and in the incident of Cozbi their sister, the daughter of the Midianite chieftain ‘ (Bamidbar, Chapter 25: 17-18).
We now know how far this enemy is prepared to go in order to undermine civilization, and the war on terror must be intensified or it may be lost. Sadly, the new British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has done the opposite. He has forbidden his cabinet to use the term ‘war on terror ‘ and sees this as a criminal investigation instead. This approach just further demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the enemy -these are not criminals.
‘Those who cure us ‘ were trying to kill us. Like the story of Balaam and the Moabites in the Bible, this is part of an organized international attempt to undermine a civilized society. Sadly, as long as this reality and its implications do not sink in, the enemy will have an advantage over us.