So why all these doctors? Yes, it was easier for them to get in, as many, starting with wonderful Mark Steyn, have noted. I’m asking a different ‘why’, along the lines of this comment from Ed Morrissey’s blog :

I can certainly see the logic in AQ wanting to recruit doctors as they can move more easily into our societies, etc.. What I don’t understand is WHY these doctors would willingly participate. I wonder if we will discover that there was some sort of compulsion, outside of ideology or religion…

I keep coming back to the basic point, which is that medical doctors have ALWAYS been overrepresented in terrorist movements. In recent years alone, we’ve had Zawahiri, Wadi Haddad and George Habash. To be sure, these were terrorist leaders, not suicide bombers (I am still waiting to see if that guy at the airport in Glasgow was really trying to blow himself up. Maybe he was. But he ‘did’ both London and Glasgow, it seems, which suggests that, at a minimum, he expected to survive London).

I think it has something to do with what Mel Brooks once referred to as “that total indifference to pain and suffering” that is necessary to be a good doctor. You have to be “clinical” about all that, because you can’t afford to have your judgment swayed by real sympathy with the sufferer.