Targeting Professors

The Washington Post reports that in addition to the now horrifyingly routine daily bombings, kidnappings, and attacks on civilians, academics and other professionals are being specifically targeted by more extreme salafist elements of the Iraqi insurgency:

Gunmen also shot three professors from Islamic University in Baghdad, killing two and wounding one, and killed the head of the Education Ministry's department of research and development as he drove to work, police said.

"It is part of the campaign to attack every positive thing in Iraq," said an Education Ministry spokesman, Basil al-Khatib, who blamed the attacks on extremists who oppose modernity and want to drive "all elite and educated people from Iraq." He complained that the national government "is not acting" to prevent further attacks against teachers, "it only talks."

At least 211 university professors and 104 officials from the ministry have been assassinated in Iraq since the war started in March 2003, Khatib said. In addition, 91 professors have been kidnapped, and their fate is unknown, he said.

PAF finds it ironic that the hatreds of the most extreme Islamists mirror the preoccupations of those in the US who insist that we must destroy "Islamofascism" and denounce those who don't think about the world in terms of this kind of simple-minded crusade.

More on the execrable Horowitz here and here.