Multiculturalist Becomes Exhibit A

In the aftermath of the London subway massacres of July 7, the doctrine of multiculturalism has come under great scrutiny and been found wanting. As one who has opposed multiculturalism for quite some time, I feel a mixture of relief that, finally, this idea is no longer uncontested, and sadness that it took an event like that to open people's eyes.

But it hasn't opened everyone's eyes, or if it has, they have sometimes been eyes that have seen only that the public is becoming wise to this thinly-veiled anti-Western ideology. The defenders of multiculturalism are beginning to fight back. What is interesting, though, is that they have to answer for or explain away the actions of savages now. In one case, this has led to such a blatant evasion that nearly any sentient being will see through it.

The article delves into the experiences of Sayyid Qutb, "the Egyptian writer generally viewed as the intellectual architect of radical political Islam," as a means of explaining that, somehow, the United States -- and not the man himself -- is to blame for his embrace of terrorism.

The puritanical scholar was shocked by Colorado's licentious women, it's true, but more significant was Qutb's encounter with what he later described as America's "evil and fanatic racial discrimination." By coincidence, Qutb arrived in the United States in 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel. He witnessed an America blind to the thousands of Palestinians being made permanent refugees by the Zionist project. [These refugees were never offered asylum by any Arab country. --ed] For Qutb, it wasn't politics, it was an assault on his identity: Clearly Americans believed that Arab lives were worth far less than those of European Jews. According to Yvonne Haddad, a professor of history at Georgetown University, this experience "left Qutb with a bitterness he was never able to shake."

When Qutb returned to Egypt he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, leading to his next life-changing event: He was arrested, severely tortured and convicted of antigovernment conspiracy in an absurd show trial. Qutb's political theory was profoundly shaped by torture. Not only did he regard his torturers as sub-human, he stretched that categorization to include the entire state that ordered this brutality, including the practicing Muslims who passively lent their support to Nasser's regime.

Qutb's vast category of subhumans allowed his disciples to justify the killing of "infidels"--now practically everyone--in the name of Islam. A movement for an Islamic state was transformed into a violent ideology that would lay the intellectual groundwork for Al Qaeda. In other words, so-called Islamist terrorism was "home grown" in the West long before the July 7 attacks--from its inception it was the quintessentially modern progeny of Colorado's casual racism and Cairo's concentration camps. [bold added]

In other words: The Great Satan made him do it.

This is no purely academic study of the life of Sayyid Qutb. Rather, after excusing Qutb's actions, the author draws a parallel between the Egyptian's life and those of modern terrorists in the vein of excusing them.

Why is it worth digging up this history now? Because the twin sparks that ignited Qutb's world-changing rage are currently being doused with gasoline: Arabs and Muslims are being debased in torture chambers around the world and their deaths are being discounted in simultaneous colonial wars, at the same time that graphic digital evidence of these losses and humiliations is available to anyone with a computer. [bold added] And once again, this lethal cocktail of racism and torture is burning through the veins of angry young men. As Qutb's past and Osman's present reveal, it's not our tolerance for multiculturalism that fuels terrorism; it's our tolerance for the barbarism committed in our name.

Note the blatant evasion of the clause above in bold. Available to anyone with a brain is the realization that images of both Westerners and Moslems being executed, tortured, and injured at the hands of Qutb's progeny are also "available to anyone with a computer." (And what I point to is mild compared to the videos of beheadings and the like which serve, I suppose, as a more acceptable and "Islamic" form of pornography to these babes in the woods who profess to be "shocked by [the] licentious women" of the West.)

By Naomi Klein's own argument, now that I have seen these images, I am fully justified in cooking up my own "vast category of subhumans" and doing whatever the hell I wish with them. Or am I not? Am I, as a Westerner, in control of my own actions, and thus to be held accountable where Qutb is to be excused? Does that not sound racist? Isn't multiculturalism supposed to be against racism? Oh, I guess she means to say that it's open season on Westerners alone. That would be the most coherent explanation.

Well, being anti-Western is what I've been criticizing multiculturalism for all along. Funny how saints like Qutb have painted the multi-culti crowd into a corner. It is getting to where refuting them is like shooting fish in a barrel.

-- CAV