It's About Morality and Culture, Stupid

Daniel Larison sucessfully rips into one of the main pillars of neoconic ideology related to - the notion that Muslim Islamist disdain our freedom.

The “they hate us for our freedoms” line is pure garbage. I don’t know how else to put it. Sayyid Qutb didn’t like how Coloradoans danced in 1949, but he didn’t make it his life’s goal to attack Americans or to urge others to attack Americans and drive us out of the Near East…because we weren’t in the Near East and Muslims around the world had no reason to feel any particular animus towards America.

I discussed Sayyid Qutb in a recent post. It is clear from reading his perspective of the world that his first impression with western freedom was not revulsion at freedom but disgust at the moral state of the west. One must remember his impression was that of 1949-50 America.

Larison states...it was the export of American pop culture to the world in the decades that followed that lit the fuse. In many respects, the export of that culture has triumphed over local resistance (I have strong doubts that this is a desirable thing), but it has generated hostility to the general experience of globalisation and rapid cultural change and those processes are unavoidably associated with the United States because so many of the largest multinationals are associated in the minds of people around the world with this country.

In fact if one really looks at the motivation and goals of Osama Bin Laden (an heir to the thoughts of Sayyid) three things become clear. One, ultimately pan-Islamist wish to reestablish the caliphate. Second, to accomplish the first goal secular and amoral regimes within historic Islamic territory must be replaced. Third, to accomplish this western armies as well as overt and covert Weatern support of secular regimes in the Islamic world must be removed.

It is important to understand motivation. Failure to understand leads to the the acceptance of stupid notions such as the idea that there are people in other parts of the world that want to actually take away our freedom. Perhaps there is a degree of truth to this - they do wish to undermine our freedom to shape the world in our own image, to support regimes of our own choosing in their lands and to deploy our troops to Islamic lands as we please. Perhaps that much is true - but the idea they they actually wish to abridge our own freedom in our own homelands is just false. For right or wrong, these people have a pretty good and solid argument against the stationing of non-Muslim troops in the land of their two holiest sites.

Don't take me wrong, I am not saying that the ideology, based upon a perversion of Islam, held by Bin Laden and crew is correct. I have read the Koran, I do not purport to be an expert on Islamic theology, but none of the Muslims I know support the interpretation of verses and passages toward evil actions used by these people. In that sense they are just as morally degraded as their enemies.

So long as men remain immoral and separated from the rule of natural law these sorts of conflicts will continue. Immorality, faith in human reason above historic understanding are the at the root of evil- I suppose the neocons, communist, socialist, Islamist and secularist of the world will just never really understand that.