Help Wanted! No Experience Necessary

Major international organization with affiliates and franchises across Mideast, Africa, Europe and the United States is now recruiting!

Successful applicants may be of any age and either sex. No specific education level is required although some positions may require technical skills.

Cognitively impaired? Emotionally troubled? No Problem!

We want you regardless of so called developmental difficulties or mental problems. We are truly equal opportunity!

Two of our most successful associates had Down's Syndrome. Others have had similar "problems."

Suicidal?

Don't wait!

Call us now!

We're al-Qaeda.

You've heard of us--now join us!

Just call us in Wazirastan. We're ready and waiting--

Are you?

Sure, al-Qaeda isn't running ads like this--yet. Still, the daring young men from the caves in the K-2 mountains might just as well be.

Either because the security forces in some locations have gotten good at stopping the usual suicide bomber or because the martyrdom brigade is running short of enlistees with big cajones and small cerebral cortexes, the Kill -Civilians-For-Allah mob has been increasingly relying on women and mentally or physically challenged.

The employment of female suicide bombers increased in Iraq--attributed by some mental health workers to the proliferation of widowhood in a war-torn society without support systems for women without "natural protectors." The Geek agrees with that argument but considers it to be only part of the story. The larger part is the nature of the hyper-patriarchal society made possible by Islamic doctrine.

The lives of women are cheap.

It is better women become martyrs than merely corpses with slit throats or blankets of rocks.

The Heroic Warriors of Islam pioneered another type of equal opportunity martyrdom in Iraq when they employed two women with Down's Syndrome to be (probably) unwitting carriers of remotely detonated bombs in the catastrophic market attacks earlier this year.

If the reports of the women's condition as given by Iraqi witnesses and authorities are true--and the Geek finds them credible after further investigation--the use of these individuals by the anti-government, anti-US terrorists marked a new and despicably low point in their tactics.

The Down's Syndrome kamikazes were a follow-on to the successful killing of an Iraqi general in Samarra in February by a man in a wheelchair. The Geek hasn't been able to resolve to his satisfaction from either US or Iraqi sources the question of the man's apparent disability or his volunteer status. Still, the event showed the willingness of the terrorists to employ either the appearance or reality of physical disability to circumvent security precautions.

(There is a US historical precedent for this approach. The assassin of President McKinley wrapped the pistol in his right hand as well as the hand that held it in a bandage and pulled the trigger as McKinley reached to shake the killer's left hand.)

The most recent attempt by the Gangsters For Global Jihad to exploit the cognitively impaired for terrorism comes from England. The other day Nicky Reilly, a 22 year old who has spent time in a mental hospital, suffered injuries when one of the three primitive bombs he was carrying detonated prematurely in the lavatory of a restaurant.

Reilly, a recent convert to Islam, has been described as having the mental age of ten and possibly laboring with the challenge of Asperger's Syndrome and schizophrenia. Those who knew him referred to him as a "shambling introvert." See the Times On-line for these characterizations. (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3999058.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797084)

A mental age of ten implies that Mr Reilly (or Mohammad Rasheed as he has been calling himself since converting) is severely mentally impaired. He would be easy pickings for a suitably intelligent al-Qaeda recruiter who had fewer ethics than a Mafia debt collector.

That Reilly was "controlled" by others is strongly implied by a text message received on his cell phone moments before his bomb exploded.

A person does not have to be possessed of a low IQ to fall prey to the homicidal beliefs of al-Qaeda thugs and their ilk. Certainly, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the infamous KSM of 9/11) is not cognitively challenged although his Navy defense attorney at Gitmo who has a psych as well as a law degree thinks KSM suffers from a disorder listed in the DSM-IV.

In the UK the Security Service (MI-5) worries that Nicky Reilly, "the friendly giant" to his neighbors, is the first in a new line of the homegrown, foreign operated terror brigade. The Geek concurs.

So far there has been no official word from our protectors, the Department of Homeland Security, whose globe trotting Secretary has been most recently in Afghanistan conferring citizenship on foreign born US service personnel and making hortatory speeches. So the Geek doesn't know if we will be treated soon to an Orange Alert warning us to keep a wary eye on all of our fellow citizens who mumble to themselves on urban street corners or lack the IQ necessary to be rocket scientists.

The Geek certainly hopes that DHS plays it cool. True, the Glorious Fighters of Islamic Conquest might try to exploit those of us who are emotionally, cognitively or physically challenged. They might even succeed in a few cases.

But, if We the People respond by increased fear and loathing directed against the mumblers and shambling introverts, "the friendly giants" of our society, we will only succeed in becoming more rigid in our conformity and far less able to accept the differences that make humans more interesting than machines.