Al Qaedaism and communism

Washington Times ^ | June 17, 2006 | Arnaud de Borchgrave

[Tailgunner Joe]

Qtub's hatred of the U.S. was similar to the ingredients that bred self-hating Americans. He viewed the world, as he saw it in 1950, as decadent, corrupt, oppressive and generating endless violence and war because of capitalist greed that was destroying Allah's creations. Many of the same strands were spun to justify the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Qtub's call to ideological arms came in response to Gamal Abdel Nasser's decision to sideline Islam by cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood, known as the Brothers ("Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying on the way to Allah is our highest hope"). Qtub's prolific writings made him the theoretician of the Brotherhood -- and a hero of every extreme Islamist movement since. The late Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shia, venerated Qtub, a Sunni, as a martyred giant of Islam and ordered a stamp issued with his effigy. Qtub was compulsory reading in Taliban schools. Osama bin Laden once studied under Mohammed Qtub, Sayed's brother, who was also his editor.

Founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, a 22-year-old elementary school teacher, the Brotherhood stepped into the vacuum created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent ban of the caliphate system of government that had kept Muslims united for hundreds of years.

Historians have compared Qtub's pamphlet "Milestones" to V.I. Lenin's "What Is To Be Done?" and deals with tactics and strategy that lead to dismantling the nation-state and regrouping the ummah under the laws of Shariah, prescribed by Allah himself. Qtub was to Osama bin Laden what Karl Marx was to Lenin, or justification for dictatorship of the proletariat.

[Sabatier]

"Qtub was to Osama bin Laden what Karl Marx was to Lenin, or justification for dictatorship of the proletariat."

Under the banner of caring for the poor and oppressed and correcting the evils of the world these "saviors" inevitably live by the sword, become power mad and destroy everything and everyone in their path. It's as predictable as night and day and yet each one of these fanatics has the hubris to believe they will triumph where all others have failed.

[68skylark]

...and yet each one of these fanatics has the hubris to believe they will triumph where all others have failed.

And they attract millions of useful idiots to help them build the path to ruin.

[Excellence]

self ping

[Maneesh]

Very informative article and very accurate too. An interesting point in the article said that this war will be longer and more difficult than the cold war which I agree with completely. Communism was based on fear of a police state and since they did not want to kill themselves MAD worked. Islam is based on a very worped world view that is supported by their holy books so you have a much higher motivated group of people than the Soviets did. Unlike communism Islam cannot be completely defeated, all we can do is suppress them severely as the West has done in the past when they were united and morally strong. This is a far tougher enemy than most people in the West realize and only the USA has the kahunas and the resources to take them on. There cannot be ultimate victory with these savages like there was with Japan, Germany and Russia. All of those societies had a semblance of rational thought and a history of relative stability. The Arab world has only known fighting for their perverse religion and are essentially incompatible with democracy.

[redpoll]

Just more proof of my gut feeling about Islamofascism being a religion devoted to eternal war. If the West is wiped out, they'll turn around and start fighting the Africans, Indians, and Chinese. All indications are that these are the same people who tried to eliminate the West at Tours in 762 AD and continued to do in varying forms and shapes in Spain, Sicily, the Balkans, and at the gates of Vienna. My fear is that the observations about the West being decadent and hollow are indeed true, in which case much of the world will collapse into a stupor for several centuries or millenia; I don't think that the ideals of individual liberty and freedom will ever be wiped out, but they might hang on like stories about Periclean Athens before anyone tries to make them real again.

It seems clear that either we fight now and face horrific choices, or wait a while and fight with even more horrific choices. Islamists won't be defeated until most are killed, apparently, and that is an awful observation on my part, since I don't like to kill anyone. Their own words have targeted me and my family for extinction, however, so my choices are either to fight back or commit suicide. I think I'd like to go down fighting.