Terror's Greatest Recruitment Tool

The Nation's Naomi Klein on the cyclical pattern of Islamic terrorism's history:

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.

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. 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.

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I didn't realize that the intellectual father of radical Islam had briefly lived in the United States and was heavily influenced by its racism and cavalier attitudes about the oppression of the Palestinians: amazingly, the same forces that helped birth what right-wingers call "Islamofascism" are still helping to inspire Muslims to become "Islamofascists" today, only on a much grander scale. If the injustice of torture and oppression are not persuasive enough to make Americans insist that US policy in the Middle East is wrongheaded, then perhaps the simple argument that such policy is counterproductive might do the trick. If only mainstream discourse on the issue didn't marginalize that thought.

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