THE RACISM OF SUBHUMANS

Naomi Klein says we are in the Islamist's crosshairs because we are seen as racists who do not value Muslims' lives:

Hussain Osman, one of the men alleged to have participated in London's failed bombings on July 21, recently told Italian investigators that they prepared for the attacks by watching "films on the war in Iraq," La Repubblica reported. "Especially those where women and children were being killed and exterminated by British and American soldiers...of widows, mothers and daughters that cry."

It has become an article of faith that Britain was vulnerable to terror because of its politically correct antiracism. Yet Osman's comments suggest that what propelled at least some of the bombers was rage at what they saw as extreme racism. And what else can we call the belief--so prevalent we barely notice it--that American and European lives are worth more than the lives of Arabs and Muslims, so much more that their deaths in Iraq are not even counted?

No doubt there are many hundreds of hours of videos of American and British forces exterminating women and children.

According to Klein, this perception is nothing new, with racism encountered by Sayyid Qutb in 1940s America contributed to his radicalization:

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. 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."

Ah yes, Colorado, home of licentious women and fanatical racial discrimination. Poor old Qutb must have found it difficult to concentrate on his university studies, what with being surrounded by all those wrongs needing righting.

Qutb eventually returned to his native Egypt where he joined the notorious Muslim Brotherhood. He was captured and tortured by authorities, causing further radicalization:

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.

So, the scholarly Godfather of Islamic terror, first radicalized by racial discrimination in the US, came to view everyone not sharing his warped worldview as less than human. Qutb had become, in effect, a super-racist.

Obviously Klein can't see that she has described the sick and twisted Islamist belief in their Allah-given superiority. It's not that they want to kill us; it's more a matter of them acting as tools of Allah in carrying out his will: if we aren't to be converted, they're going to get us out of the way.

Having set the scene, Klein moves on to Iraq:

Into this explosive environment has stepped Tony Blair, determined to sell two of the main causes of terror as its cure. He intends to deport more Muslims to countries where they will likely face torture. And he will keep fighting wars in which soldiers don't know the names of the towns they are leveling. (According to an August 5 Knight Ridder report, a Marine sergeant in Iraq recently pumped up his squad by telling them that "these will be the good old days, when you brought...death and destruction to--what the fuck is this place called?" Someone piped in helpfully, "Haqlaniyah.")

The sergeant Klein quotes is the quintessentially named American Marine, Sgt. Marcio Vargas Estrada. Here's what he said in context:

"If somebody shoots at you, you waste the m-----------," said Estrada, 32, of Kearny, N.J. "When you go back to Camp Lejeune (in North Carolina), these will be the good old days, when you brought ... death and destruction to - what the f--- is this place called?"

A Marine answered in the darkness: "Haqlaniyah."

Estrada continued: "Haqlaniyah, yeah, that. And then we will take death and destruction to Haditha. Hopefully, we'll stay until December so we can bring death and destruction to half of f------ Iraq."

The flatbed truck erupted in a storm of "Hoo-ahs."

Lima Company rumbled toward town at 5:30 a.m.

At 6:04 a.m., Sgt. Maj. Arthur Mennig, riding in the open air of the truck and listening to the radio, turned to the side and muttered, "We've already had a vehicle hit a mine."

Nasty stuff indeed, this talk of shooting motherfuckers after they've shot at you, and destroying half of fucking Iraq. But their actions don't match the pre-engagement peptalk:

At one of the first houses they raided, Mennig pushed a man against the wall, yelling, "Don't you f------ look at me."

Insurgent mortars crashed outside. Mennig continued patting the man down. The hiss and boom of a nearby rocket-propelled grenade rang out.

Mennig ran to the front yard, where Staff Sgt. James McCarver crouched, scanning the horizon over nearby homes.

"How much do you want to bet that fire is coming from the mosque?" Mennig said.

AK-47 fire rattled in the distance.

"I guarantee you that's where the sniper round that went over my vehicle came from," said McCarver, 30, of Houston.

Two more mortars fell. The limbs of the date trees in the yard shook.

"That's getting f------ close," said Mennig, a stocky Marine who keeps his head shaved bald.

An American Mark-19 gun, an automatic grenade launcher, went boom-boom-boom a few blocks away, and then an American .50-caliber machine gun followed with its angry staccato.

Mennig grinned.

By noon, at least two 500-pound bombs had been called in on the borders of the town.

Swearing at civilians while taking fire from attackers probably hidden in a mosque and then dropping not one but two 500 lb bombs on the outskirts of town ... these guys must not have been paying attention during town-leveling training.

Anyway, back to Klein, who concludes her piece:

The real problem is not too much multiculturalism but too little. If the diversity now ghettoized on the margins of Western societies--geographically and psychologically--were truly allowed to migrate to the centers, it might infuse public life in the West with a powerful new humanism. If we had deeply multi-ethnic societies, rather than shallow multicultural ones, it would be much more difficult for politicians to sign deportation orders sending Algerian asylum-seekers to torture, or to wage wars in which only the invaders' dead are counted. A society that truly lived its values of equality and human rights, at home and abroad, would have another benefit too. It would rob terrorists of what has always been their greatest recruitment tool: our racism.

Sorry, Naomi, you're wrong: if we just sit back and allow the Islamist tumour to remain in place it will grow and metastasize, just as National Socialism did, nurtured in the breasts of those who convinced themselves any means could be employed to justify the end they sought. Then there are the Commies ...