The Power of Nightmares: Jahiliyya
Between renders this evening I started watching The Power Of Nightmares, availiable at Netflix, Google video, or a BitTorrent node near you. The documentary starts its history of middle eastern terrorism with Sayed Kotb, an Islamic Egyptian who came to tour and study American schools in Greely, Colorado in the summer of 1949. In Truman's America he saw "crassness and corruption, vulgarity, talk centered on movie stars and automobile prices. This was indicative of selfish and materialistic American life. Americans lived these isolated lives ... they lusted after material goods." The people he saw "believed that they were free, but were trapped by their greedy and selfish desires. He committed himself to prevent this selfish individualism from taking over his country". Kotb's writings alerted Muslims to what they came to percieve as the threat of American popular culture, which might make Arabs materialistic, greedy, indulgent, and isolated.
Earlier this evening I also read john_of_arabia's recent (and totally on-target) comments about popular American interests in a few thoughts:
America really doesn't, deep down inside, give a shit about this war. Yeah, sure, we're upset over some troops getting killed, and wow, the price of gas has gone up, but really, it doesn't effect them at all. They're happy to cruise along, fat dumb and happy and wrapped up in their dramatic lives, and don't really give two shits if we're there or not.
I don't mean to imply that john_of_arabia would object to mixed-sex social events or the sock hop like Kotb did. I don't mean to imply that their solutions to what they saw are similar, or make any other moral equivalences of any kind. I just find it ironic that, seeing America after a long immersion in the middle east, the father of the radical islamic movement and a warrior against the radical islamic movement (and a blogger in Los Angeles for that matter) could have such similar concerns about American society and popular culture.
Maybe they're on to something.
Earlier this evening I also read john_of_arabia's recent (and totally on-target) comments about popular American interests in a few thoughts:
America really doesn't, deep down inside, give a shit about this war. Yeah, sure, we're upset over some troops getting killed, and wow, the price of gas has gone up, but really, it doesn't effect them at all. They're happy to cruise along, fat dumb and happy and wrapped up in their dramatic lives, and don't really give two shits if we're there or not.
I don't mean to imply that john_of_arabia would object to mixed-sex social events or the sock hop like Kotb did. I don't mean to imply that their solutions to what they saw are similar, or make any other moral equivalences of any kind. I just find it ironic that, seeing America after a long immersion in the middle east, the father of the radical islamic movement and a warrior against the radical islamic movement (and a blogger in Los Angeles for that matter) could have such similar concerns about American society and popular culture.
Maybe they're on to something.