Soccer Dad

Parallel extremists

Daled Amos runs pictures showing the parallel in professed viciousness between the Left's extremists and the Islamist extremists. He also asks an important question.

Crediting the New Editor, Little Green Footballs provides an excerpt from David von Drehle's "A Lesson in Hate," from this month's Smithsonian. It is about the intellectual father of Al Qaeda, Sayyid Qutb.

Some biographical sketches suggest that Qutb arrived with a benign view of America, but if that’s true it didn’t last long. During a short stay in Washington, D.C., he witnessed the commotion surrounding an elevator accident and was stunned to hear other onlookers making a joke of the victim’s appearance. From this and a few offhand remarks in other settings, Qutb concluded that Americans suffered from “a drought of sentimental sympathy” and that “Americans intentionally deride what people in the Old World hold sacred.”

This became the lens through which Qutb read nearly every American encounter—a clash of New World versus Old. Qutb easily satisfied the requirements at the graduate school of the Colorado State College of Education (now known as the University of Northern Colorado) and devoted the rest of his time to his true interest—the American soul, if such a thing existed. “This great America: What is its worth in the scale of human values?” Qutb wondered. “And what does it add to the moral account of humanity?” His answer: nothing.

Unforunately the complete article does not appear to be available to non-subscribers. But for another excellent profile of Qutb let me suggest The Philosopher of Islamic Terror from the NY Times Magazine of March 23, 2003 by Paul Berman.

Sitting in a wretched Egyptian prison, surrounded by criminals and composing his Koranic commentaries with Nasser's speeches blaring in the background on the infuriating tape recorder, Qutb knew whom to blame. He blamed the early Christians. He blamed Christianity's modern legacy, which was the liberal idea that religion should stay in one corner and secular life in another corner. He blamed the Jews. In his interpretation, the Jews had shown themselves to be eternally ungrateful to God. Early in their history, during their Egyptian captivity (Qutb thought he knew a thing or two about Egyptian captivity), the Jews acquired a slavish character, he believed. As a result they became craven and unprincipled when powerless, and vicious and arrogant when powerful. And these traits were eternal. The Jews occupy huge portions of Qutb's Koranic commentary -- their perfidy, greed, hatefulness, diabolical impulses, never-ending conspiracies and plots against Muhammad and Islam. Qutb was relentless on these themes. He looked on Zionism as part of the eternal campaign by the Jews to destroy Islam.

And Qutb blamed one other party. He blamed the Muslims who had gone along with Christianity's errors -- the treacherous Muslims who had inflicted Christianity's ''schizophrenia'' on the world of Islam. And, because he was willing to blame, Qutb was able to recommend a course of action too -- a revolutionary program that was going to relieve the psychological pressure of modern life and was going to put man at ease with the natural world and with God.

UPDATE: And while we're discussing intellectual forbearers of today's Islamism I shouldn't forget Elder of Ziyon's The Mufti's short-lived rival. As is so often the case with the Elder he revisits one of those foresaken corners of history that illuminates our current condition.

Technorati Tags: Sayyid Qutb, Little Green Footballs, Islamism.

Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Posted by SoccerDad at February 12, 2006 5:51 AM