Giving radical Islam its start

By Dinesh D'Souza

"Recently Jimmy Carter was on television, denouncing President Bush’s policies in Iraq. I find this highly ironic, because Jimmy Carter and his liberal advisers helped the Ayatollah Khomeini to come to power in Iran a quarter of a century ago. Thus they gave radical Islam control of its first major state. How this happened is worth recalling, because from Carter’s failure there’s a valuable lesson to be learned in Iraq.

Islamic radicals have been around since the 1920s, but for decades they were outsiders even in the Muslim countries. One of their leading theoreticians, Sayyid Qutb, argued that radical Muslims could not just promulgate theories and have meetings; they must seek to realize the Islamic state “in a concrete form.” What was needed, he wrote, was “to initiate the movement of Islamic revival in some Muslim country.” Once the radicals controlled a state, he suggested, they could then use it as a beachhead for launching the takeover of other Muslim countries." Continue reading...