Posted on 08/24/2005 1:12:45 PM PDT by SamuraiScot
During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station.
I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were.
The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization; and 2) Islamists do not.
The Islamic terror movement did not arise among grandmothers on the “Arab street.” Its founders and leaders have been modern, middle-class intellectuals who like ideas more than people. They are perfectly willing to kidnap civilians, bomb women and children, cut off limbs and heads — because they believe in nothing. They recite declarations and position papers so tedious that listeners apparently volunteer for suicide missions just to get out of the room.
Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949) was a college student in Cairo during the 1920s, a time of economic growth and modernization in Egypt. He became active in the austere Wahhabi Muslim movement, a “back to the old ways” revival. It teaches that modern life is corrupt, and that even Muslim teaching after the 10th century is worthless.
In 1928, Hasan founded a secret political organization of middle-class professionals called the Muslim Brotherhood, which promoted the overthrow of any government that is not Wahhabist. During this time, Hasan wrote many letters to a man he admired who headed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The two had common interests: driving Britain and France out of the Mideast and killing all the Jews in the world. The other man’s name was Hitler.
The Brotherhood allied itself with the Nazis and created the “Handschar” Muslim division for the German SS, whose members were later pursued for war crimes against Jews, Gypsies, and Serbs in Croatia.
Brotherhood members created the Arab League in 1944. After the birth of Israel in 1948, League nations mounted an unsuccessful war to “drive the Jews into the sea,” repeating the attempt in 1956, 1967, and 1973.
After World War II, many of Hitler’s men, including his Swiss banker, Francois Genoud, used Nazi money and expertise to organize Islamist operations in the Middle East. Their clients included the Islamic forces that drove the French out of North Africa and the terrorist groups that attacked Israeli civilians and hijacked Western airliners in the 1970s.
Now fueled by Saudi oil money, the Brotherhood has spread to 70 countries. Generations of Arab leaders have been members, including Nasser, Sadat, Arafat, and bin Laden — who today heads a more radical Wahhabi split-off from the Brotherhood called Al Qaeda.
Amazingly, four years after 9/11, some Americans still seem to be in denial of the fact that we face a dangerous enemy.
Michael Moore on the hand-waving Left and The American Conservative on the gloom-and-doom Right agree that the reason Muslim terrorism exists is that America is oppressing Muslims. University of Chicago professor Robert Pape warns against installing a popularly elected government in Iraq, saying it is “likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.”
And yet, in Algeria, the Wahhabists’ war with that government has killed 100,000 people. And it is hard to see how American imperialism has caused the murder of 600 Buddhists by Muslim militias in Thailand or the Islamic war of extermination against the Molucca Christians in Indonesia. And there are the reported 2 million who were killed in the Sudan where the US has no presence.
What the pan-Islamic movement shares with other 20th-century totalitarian cults such as Nazism and Communism is nihilism. In contrast to Judaism and Christianity, which teach that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, these cults acknowledge no moral law that forbids a man from treating another (or by extension, himself) as if he were nothing.
Perhaps through the stabbing, shooting, gassing, raping, bombing, desecrating, beheading, and poisoning, Wahhabis try to expunge their own physical weakness and become pure spirit.
Their rage against the body does not stop even with death. Because they don’t believe in grave markers, Wahhabis today travel from Saudi Arabia to Kosovo and smash the markers and tear up the photographs placed on graves by the families of Albanian Muslims.
The dissolute young Saudis living in Hamburg who became the 9/11 hijackers were straight out of Nietzsche:
“Nihilism is . . . not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plough; one destroys.” (Will to Power)
Will we fight for the goodness of life? Today, each of us must decide if he believes in life — or in nothing.
Duncan Maxwell Anderson is president of High Tor Media, Inc., which produces family-oriented and educational books and publications. His e-mail address is dmanderson@hightormedia.com.
Hitler in a headscarf.
Although I thought this thread might be about David Duke.
Islamofacists are nothing but Nazis without fashion sense.
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