THEY'RE SLAUGHTERING YOU LIKE SHEEP AND YOU STILL LOOK WITHIN.

Now that the Democrat leadership is going to focus on the "root causes" of terrorism, perhaps it would be useful to find out what those "root causes" are, from someone who knows:

"The deliberate and determined expansion of militant Islam and its attempt to triumph not only in the Islamic world but in Europe and North America. Pure ideology. Muslim terrorists kill and slaughter not because of what they experience but because of what they believe."

Dr. Tawfik Hamid is a 45-year-old Egyptian doctor who was once affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood -- and the Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, a banned terrorist group in which he was trained by fellow physician Ayman Zawahiri.

"The first thing you have to understand is that it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with poverty or lack of education," he says.

"I was from a middle-class family and my parents were not religious. Hardly anyone in the movement at university came from a background that was different from mine."

And their terrorist ideology is widely shared:

"We're not talking about a fringe cult here," he tells me. "Salafist [fundamentalist] Islam is the dominant version of the religion and is taught in almost every Islamic university in the world. It is puritanical, extreme and does, yes, mean that women can be beaten, apostates killed and Jews called pigs and monkeys."

So why do they become terrorists?

"Islam also tells of unlimited sexual ecstasy in paradise with beautiful virgins for the martyr who gives his life for the faith. Don't for a moment underestimate this blinding passion or its influence on those who accept fundamentalism." A pause. "I know. I was one who accepted it."

This partial explanation is shocking more for its banality than its horror. Mass murder provoked partly by simple lust. But it cannot be denied that letters written by suicide bombers frequently dwell on waiting virgins and sexual gratification.

"The sexual aspect is, of course, just one part of this. But I can tell you what it is not about. Not about Israel, not about Iraq, not about Afghanistan. They are mere excuses. Algerian Muslim fundamentalists murdered 150,000 other Algerian Muslims, sometimes slitting the throats of children in front of their parents. Are you seriously telling me that this was because of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians or American foreign policy?"

Dr. Tawfik Hamid's advice for the West:

"Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches.

Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want."

Do you think the Democrat majorities in Congress will heed that advice?

Reliapundit answers: NO.