Foehammer’s Anvil

I’ve encountered information about Sayyid Qutb before, and I’m thankful to reader Gramfan for pointing me towards the following article so that I might share it with the rest of you. As you will see, Sayyid Qutb had a very potent influence on the likes of Osama bin Laden, and despite having lived in some of the most beautiful parts of the United States for some years and receiving the benefits of our educational system, Qutb cultivated his hatred and desire for jihad even more. In fact, his history and wanderings in the U.S. and his particular criticisms of “American decadence” hit so close to home with me, that I will only not relate here in more detail for sake of anonymity, that it’s nothing short of eerie.

From the Smithsonian Magazine article ‘A Lesson In Hate’:

Before Sayyid Qutb became a leading theorist of violent jihad, he was a little-known Egyptian writer sojourning in the United States, where he attended a small teachers college on the Great Plains. Greeley, Colorado, circa 1950 was the last place one might think to look for signs of American decadence. Its wide streets were dotted with churches, and there wasn’t a bar in the whole temperate town. But the courtly Qutb (COO-tub) saw things that others did not. He seethed at the brutishness of the people around him: the way they salted their watermelon and drank their tea unsweetened and watered their lawns. He found the muscular football players appalling and despaired of finding a barber who could give a proper haircut. As for the music: “The American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crude screaming,” Qutb wrote when he returned to Egypt. “It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.”

Such grumbling by an unhappy crank would be almost comical but for one fact: a direct line of influence runs from Sayyid Qutb to Osama bin Laden, and to bin Laden’s Egyptian partner in terror, Ayman al-Zawahiri. From them, the line continues to another quietly seething Egyptian sojourning in the United States: the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. Qutb’s gripes about America require serious attention because they cast light on a question that has been nagging since the fall of the World Trade Center: Why do they hate us?

Born in 1906 in the northern Egyptian village of Musha and raised in a devout Muslim home, Qutb memorized the Koran as a boy. Later he moved to Cairo and found work as a teacher and writer. His novels made no great impression, but he earned a reputation as an astute literary critic. Qutb was among the first champions of Naguib Mahfouz, a young, modern novelist who, in 1988, would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. As Qutb matured, his mind took on a more political cast. Even by the standards of Egypt, those were chaotic, corrupt times: World War I had completed the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and the Western powers were creating, with absolute colonial confidence, new maps and governments for the Middle East. For a proud man like Sayyid Qutb, the humiliation of his country at the hands of secular leaders and Western puppets was galling. His writing drew unfavorable attention from the Egyptian government, and by 1948, Mahfouz has said, Qutb’s friends in the Ministry of Education were sufficiently worried about his situation that they contrived to send him abroad to the safety of the United States.

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.”

Now, never being fully satisfied to just toss bits of history at you without showing how the “other side” thinks, read this bit of spin that I pulled off of a recent History Channel comments thread. The writer is quite obviously a Muslim spinmeister who perhaps even has a desk in a CAIR office. I would not be at all surprised:

Sayyed Qutub was one of the most harmful deviants of the modern age. Over the past two hundred years there have been many. They were all backed or tied to the mainly British program to infiltrate and corrupt Islam from within. The demise of the Ottoman Caliphate was the grand prize sought by Her Majestys’ Secret Service.

We never learn. The Al-Qaida was spurred on by CIA Agents and trained in U.S. facilities, it is just history repeating itself. The war on terror is a calculated war. It just needed the right recruits to carry out the plans and generate a new line of “enemies” that would sustain an unlimited protracted war to expand and empower Western domination in the Middle East.

Say it ‘aint so!

OK. It ain’t so. But you already know that, don’t you, Mr. Mubarak? In fact, it looks to me as if the Muslim-coalition of historical revisionists are hard at work in the History Channel forums. Just take a look at another’s handiwork. Isn’t the Internet great though? I can just pull apart boards and discussion groups in seconds and show you the meaty contents to prove a point — the Islamists are fighting us on all levels. This isn’t just about Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.

Still not convinced? Then here’s the real story of the day to which I have been leading with all this:

CAIR PRAISES HOUSE PASSAGE OF ANTI-HATE CRIMES BILL

(WASHINGTON, D.C., 5/3/2007) - The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today congratulated the US House of Representatives on its passage of the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

To see how your U.S. representative voted, go here: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2007/roll299.xml

CAIR has supported the act since 2005 and last week renewed its call for the community to urge elected officials to pass the measure.

SEE: Support the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007
http://capwiz.com/cair/home/

The Senate now must consider its version of the bill, known as S. 1105.

If passed, the law would allow the Attorney General to provide federal assistance to local law enforcement to aid investigations of crimes motivated by “…prejudice based on the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin…” of the victim.

You can find discussion of this dangerous proposal at Atlas Shrugs, but also this morning there is a most excellent response from Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch. Here is a taste of his thoughts:

Of course, we already have thought crime in America. When public figures and media talking heads (you know who I’m talking about — almost everybody, Left and Right) relentlessly purvey polite fictions about Islam as a religion of peace instead of having the courage to challenge the American Muslim community, we have thoughtcrime. Challenge the American Muslim community? Yes — to confront the elements of Islam that the jihadists are using to justify violence and formulate positive ways to neutralize their capacity to be used in such a way. In other words, to institute large-scale programs — transparent, sincere, and verifiable ones — to teach against the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism in American schools and mosques. This would actually empower the reformers these people claim to support, since no reform can begin until one is ready to admit that something needs reforming.

But the Matthews and Dobbses and Hannitys and Becks of the world would rather play pretend. They’d rather tell their viewers fantasies and fictions rather than deal with harsh realities, because to do otherwise would be to commit thoughtcrime. CAIR and its ilk have already been quite successful in casting any honest discussion of the elements of Islam that are being used today by the jihadists to justify their actions as “anti-Muslim,” “Islamophobic,” “bigoted,” “hateful,” etc. And the fearless free media cowers in terror.

In reality, however, it is not anti-Muslim, “Islamophobic,” bigoted or hateful simply to point out what Muhammad taught, according to the earliest Islamic sources, and what the Qur’an says, as interpreted by the mainstream Sunni schools of jurisprudence, and what Islamic law says, and what the record of Islamic history is. How could such a thing be hateful, or loving, for that matter? It is what it is. The fact that almost no major media types will dare to look at this material squarely shows how effective the Orwellian mau-mauing has been. Thoughtcrime is real, and few are willing to commit it.

Read the rest. Obviously I am not going to stand for such a law to be passed. As Mr. Spencer so aptly points out, the real ‘thought crimes’ are those committed every damn day by our duly elected representatives when they do not bring you straight talk like you will find here on the Anvil and to a slightly lesser extent over at JW and LGF. Why are we wrapped up in ambiguities and deception and this is accepted by the American people? It is because you are so used to not being told the facts that you run from the truth!

Well, what’s next — will I be charged with hate crimes or ‘thought crimes’ for speaking my mind on the falsity of the cult of Islam? I suppose we’ll wait and see. But I’d wager that there will be more evidence of my being very right in my pursuits of truth when it comes to this subject matter. During the coming months and years, we’ll have Islamists and Jihadists to thank for the violence and the poisoning of minds both.

Then what other crimes will I be guilty of if only not getting you to believe me soon enough?

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