Willful Ignorance Then and Now

The Roots of Islamofascism run deep.

Know Our Enemy
by Rod Dreher
03:58 PM CDT on Sunday, August 27, 2006

The pious life and martyr's death of Sayyid Qutb, and the legacy the Islamic theologian left behind, extend a powerful challenge to the West. Until we provide an answer to him and his followers, we can't hope to prevail in the war of ideas with Islamic extremists. And most of us have no idea who this man even was. Sayyid Qutb (pronounced KUH-tuhb) has been called "the philosopher of Islamic terror." He rose from humble origins in rural Egypt to become an influential theologian and leading light of Egypt's fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood movement. He advocated global Islamic rule imposed by the sword.

The Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered him hanged for treason Aug. 29, 1966.

Yet, his ideas have spread like a prairie fire over the parched landscape of Islam's last generation. As writer Paul Berman observed, Qutb was "the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into al-Qaeda."

. . .

What is to be done? Lenin famously asked about Czarist Russia. Qutb's answer to the same question about the West was, in part, "Milestones," a Leninist-style tract advocating worldwide Islamic revolution.

In this thin volume, Qutb argues that the Islamic nation must overthrow modernity if it wishes to continue to exist. Only Islam, with its divinely given law regulating all aspects of daily life, is capable of rightly ordering the soul and body, and of being most true to God-given human nature. He believed the West, whether or not it realized it, was engaged in a fight to the death against Islam. Though the conflict had military, economic and cultural aspects, for Qutb, this was essentially a religious war.

"Milestones" calls for the subjugation of all non-Islamic peoples, the total crushing of all non-Islamic institutions and entities, and the universal imposition of harsh sharia law. Reading "Milestones" as a guide to the mentality of jihadists is a bone-chilling exercise (even more so when you consider that Muslim teens participating in a 2004 quiz competition at the Dallas Central Mosque were assigned "Milestones" as part of their contest reading).

His is the voice of the genocidal utopian, an apocalyptic idealist who – like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao – will stop at nothing to create an earthly paradise on the bones of the Crusaders, Zionists, moderate Muslims and sundry infidels.

Via Rocco DiPippo at The Autonomist.

A common refrain from the Coalition of the Unwilling is that US arrogance upset the jihadis and neocon aggression made the problem worse. In other words the jihadis are not attacking, they are counter-attacking. They are acting only in self-defense and thus are not to blame.

Nice try. The logic is familiar because it is also used by those who support a vigorous defense of civilization against the jihadis. The distinction of course is that the silly infidels arguing in favor of the jihadis are, generally speaking, spectacularly ignorant of the ideology they defend or even the basics of its history.

The way they fit Sayyid Qutb into their worldview is to ignore him.

Confederate Yankee points out a similar Shia-flavored situation:

To admit that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad means precisely what he says, and has said time and again, is to admit to larger dangers that neither the press nor the Democratic party they overwhelming support can admit. To admit to the truth—to show what Iran and its leader represent as a threat to the world—is to shatter a carefully crafted illusion they have formulated that most of the problems of the world originate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

When faced with revealing a truth that would create cognitive dissonance, the media has made the subconscious decision to simply excise, and then ignore, the facts that undercut their "larger truth." They’d rather risk lives than admit the possibility that President Bush's concerns about a nuclear-armed Iran are precisely on target.

They aren't scared about the possibility of millions of people dying. That are far more fearful that the President is right, and that the world they've created for themselves is all too wrong.