Terror and liberalism

Annotations

Transcription of Annotations

Notes on front endpapers refer to U.S.efforts for Muslims in supporting a Palestinian State, sending food aid to Somalia and coming to the aid of Muslims in Kosovo, list Arab and Muslim terrorists who have Western roots, and contrast the West's belief in rebellion with the Islamic belief in submission. The disconnect between the rational consensus at the beginning of World War I and the 9 million war dead at the end is pointed out. Other notes refer to Sayyid Qutb, the most influential writer among Sunni Arabs, his education at the University of Northern Colorado, his master work 'In the shade of the Qur'an' and his execution by Nasser in 1961. The purpose of liberalism is identified as the separation of religion and the state. Qutb despised this "hideous schizophrenia of modern life" for which he blamed the Jews since two Jewish thinkers - Marx and Freud - had contributed to the materialistic doctrine and the sexual revolution in his mind. The back endpapers include notes on the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and identify Qutb and Khomeini as fellow thinkers. Martyrdom is called 'the highest and most beautiful of destinies'. It is also pointed out that the Palestinians have attached the Nazi label to Israel. Other notes call the 1991 Gulf War a colossal blunder since it taught the world that America could be withstood. The following questions and statements are part of the notes: "In Islam the divine is everything." -- "Sweden [is] left wing, Switzerland [is] right wing - both cared only for themselves and remained neutral thanks to others who did the fighting." - "Islam in its radical version of the present poses every imaginable danger." -- Annotations by Brian Lamb in the margins and underlining of pertinent phrases throughout the book. -- Examples: p. 77: "He [Qutb] wanted to show that Islam was self-sufficient - that Islam did not need the thinkers of the West, could rely on its own spectacular resources of the past, was all-inclusive, independent, and fully adequate." -- p. 103: "Nasser hanged Qutb because the Egyptian state feared the subversive violence of the Muslim Brotherhood." -- p. 120: "Totalitarianism: [a] cult of death." -- p. 153: "The 9/11 attacks revealed many unexpected and astonishing truths, but surely the most astonishing of all was that, in Arlington, Virginia, the Pentagon had no plan to defend the Pentagon. Everyone, unto the chiefest of Indian chiefs, turned out to be a simpleminded rationalist, expecting the world too act in sensible ways, without mystery, self-contradiction, murk or madness. In this country, we are all Noam Chomsky."