Hating Freedom

George W. Bush:  “The terrorists hate freedom.”

Left Wing Asshats: “That is a gross oversimplification!  Who are we to determine what freedom is?  These brave insurgents are merely fighting to rid their country of the fascist US occcupying force.  They fight for nothing more than the right to self-determination.  The idea that they fight us because they hate freedom is ridiculous!”

Zarqawi:  “No, we pretty much hate freedom.”

A speaker purporting to be Iraq’s most feared terror leader declared a “fierce war” on democracy and said in an audiotape posted Sunday on the Web that the Americans were using next weekend’s Iraqi elections to install the Shiites in power.

“We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology,” said the speaker, who identified himself as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of the Al Qaeda affiliate in Iraq. “Anyone who tries to help set up this system is part of it.”

The speaker said candidates running in the Jan. 30 elections are “demi-idols” and those who vote for them “are infidels.” U.S. and Iraqi officials fear insurgent attacks and have announced massive security measures to protect voters.

“You have to be careful of the enemy’s plan to implement so-called democracy in your country,” he added. He said the Americans have engineered the election “to make Shiites dominate the regime in Iraq. Four million Shiites were brought from Iran to take part in the elections to achieve their aim of winning” most of the positions.

I think at this point it is worth quoting from a brilliant essay by Dinesh D’Souza about fundamentalist Islamist author Sayyid Qutb, who lived in America and wrote about his experiences. 

Like the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center, Qutb was a man who lived in the West and knew its ways. After studying in America, he wrote a book called The America That I Saw in which he argued that his familiarity with the United States was his basis for rejecting it. Qutb wrote that he was shocked by the rampant prejudice of Americans, especially toward Arabs and Muslims. He professed outrage at the materialism and sexual promiscuity of American culture. Even the church, Qutb commented, has become a place for amusement and social interaction rather than worship.

In his later writings, Qutb alleged that America used to be Christian; now it is pagan. The Muslim believer, he wrote, has no reason to envy or emulate the ways of America; rather, true Muslims should feel contempt for those ways. “The believer from his height looks down at the people drowning in dirt and mud.”

How, in Qutb’s view, did America reach its sorry state? One problem, Qutb said, is that American and indeed Western institutions are fundamentally atheist, based on a clear rejection of divine authority. “Democracy” and “capitalism” are in Qutb’s view atheistic ideas. When democrats say that sovereignty flows from the people, this means that the people — not God — are the rulers. So democracy is a form of idol worship. So, too, Qutb insisted that capitalism, which is based on the notion that the market and not God is the best arbitrator of value, is a form of idolatry.

Read the whole article.  It is plainly apparent to any thinking person (which excludes most liberals) that what we are currently fighting in Iraq is, literally, the difference between freedom and enslavement for the Iraqi people, and by proxy all of the Middle East.  And while the region is in the steel grip of the Islamists the western world can never truly consider itself safe and secure.  This is the big picture that George W. Bush sees so clearly, and most of the world refuses to acknowledge.