"MUSLIMS SEE ‘LIBERALISM’ AS AMERICA’S DOWNFALL
Islamic terrorists hate America because it has been corrupted by “liberalism.”
To understand why terrorists call Americans the “infidels,” you have to understand the Islamist philosopher Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian born in 1906. His writings in the 1950s and ‘60s set the stage for today’s showdown between the Muslim fundamentalists and the “liberal societies” of the West.
Qutb (pronounced KUH-tahb) lived in America in the late 1940s while earning a Master’s degree at the Colorado State College of Education. He was shocked by America’s “sexual freedoms” and other liberal ideas about women and society.
Qutb’s saw the danger of America’s liberty society as the separation of the church and state. He was concerned that people with liberal ideas were mounting a massive campaign against Islam.
Qutb’s brother, Muhammad, was a distinguished Saudi professor of Islamic Studies. One of his students was Osama bin Laden, the leader of the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
Sayyid Qutb’s influential book, “In the Shade of the Qur’an” (from the prophet Mohammad’s Koran), set forth the Koranic principles to turn Islam into a political movement to create a new society – one that would be the opposite of a “liberal society.”
Qutb outlined a revolutionary program that was going to relieve the psychological pressure of modern (liberal) life by putting humanity at ease with the natural world and with God.
Qutb opposed the United States because it was a liberal society that had lost its way .
Religion was the issue. For Qutb, religion was central to human behavior, and survival. America had separated the sacred from the secular, sowing the seeds of atheism and a disregard for human life.
Qutb became a martyr after Egyptian authorities hanged him in 1966 for his moral religious beliefs.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that American culture has deteriorated over the past 50 years, with drugs, pornography, crime, murder, political and corporate corruption at an all-time high.
Today, some three out of four babies are born out of wedlock in Urban America, with the national average reaching one out of three babies being born out of wedlock. And that doesn’t include millions of abortions.
Also, America’s divorce rate is now more than 50 percent.
What happened to fatherhood and marriage?
The nuclear family has been devastated by modern liberal ideas, as has our liberal educational system.
Now add to that growing list of failures, the liberal dumbing-down and downsizing of our once laudable standards and values, originally set forth by our freedom-loving founders more than 200 years ago.
What a frightening future for anyone with faith and values.
America is at a historic, global crossroads.
Will liberalism continue to demoralize and ultimately destroy our society?
Or will America return to the common sense principles of our Constitutional Republic based on the “rule of law?”
For more on the issues presented in this column, read Paul Berman’s book “Terror and Liberalism” (W.W. Norton)."