Yes, the jihadis really do hate us for our freedoms

Speaking at Notre Dame on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, atrocities, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh reflected on the terrorists’ hatred of America as a motivating force.“The reason they attacked us is because they hate our Constitution, which I carry with me all the time. They hate our values,” he explained. “They hate freedom of religion. They hate freedom of speech. And we have preserved that in the 25 years since. We’ve preserved a lot as a country and thrived as a country notwithstanding what happened.” This factual assessment was assailed by critics, including one who has apologized to his fellow leftists for railing against non-Muslims as “cattle.” In response to Kavanaugh’s comments, he sneered, “This is child-like ignorance and inanity and embarrassing to see from a Supreme Court justice. We are governed by right-wing idiots at all the highest levels of our government.” Is it actually embarrassing, idiotic ignorance, and inanity to assert that jihadis attacked America for the reasons Kavanaugh mentioned? Let’s consult two important sources on the subject. One is the intellectual godfather of radical, violent Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, who inspired organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda. Qutb spent years studying in rural, conservative Colorado, in a “dry” town during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Studio 54, this was not. He nevertheless perceived the culture around him to be scandalous and decadent. He seethed about American music, clutched his proverbial pearls over coed dances, spat disgust at muscular men, and even complained about the local barbers. He viewed the community’s women as sexualized harlots, ranting about how the average American woman “knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.”Again, this was in the tame Leave It To Beaver sockhop era.Disgusted by Americans’ allegedly “primitive desires,” he left the United States and began formulating the intellectual and theological underpinnings for violent jihad. That twisted cause was eventually taken up by the other relevant source in this discussion, Osama bin Laden, who wrote a letter to Americans after orchestrating a mass murder of their fellow countrymen in 2001. After meandering diatribes about the Jews and Palestine and supposed U.S. crimes, bin Laden wrote that murdering civilians was permissible because Americans see their country “as the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will.” In this Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2013 photo, neighborhood resident Mohamed Alassane walks past a room where he and other residents say al Qaida held European hostages, at the Ministry of Finance’s Regional Audit Department, in Timbuktu, Mali. (AP Photo/Rukmini Callimachi) | Rukmini Callimachi In short, no American was innocent. The spiritual approval for mass murder, he added, was divine: “Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge.”He then posed two questions on behalf of al Qaeda. “What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?” He furnished answers: “The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.” Revisionists insist that it’s bigotry to connect the 9/11 attacks to religion. But religion was bin Laden’s overwhelming, explicitly stated motivation. His demented propaganda screed went on:“The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you. We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest. We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached. It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind: You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator.” His murderous scolding continued with scathing references to factors such as the legality of alcohol, gambling, and various “acts of immorality,” which he derided as “pillars of personal freedom,” in the Infidels’ worldview. He excoriated the alleged “exploitation’ of women in the service industry, doing jobs such as waitressing, calling it a treacherous manipulation to allow females to “serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins.” These are direct attacks against our values, our freedoms, our way of life, our constitution, our system of government, our pluralistic society, and, generally, our refusal to live under Shariah supremacism. Kavanaugh, unlike his ignorant detractors, was correct about bin Laden’s grievances because bin Laden told us what they were. The deceased arch-terrorist also issued additional threats, replete with Quranic citations: “If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation. The Nation of Monotheism, that puts complete trust on Allah and fears none other than Him … The Nation of Martyrdom; the Nation that desires death more than you desire life … The Nation of victory and success that Allah has promised … the Nation that rejects your attacks, wishes to remove your evils, and is prepared to fight you. You are well aware that the Islamic Nation, from the very core of its soul, despises your haughtiness and arrogance. If the Americans refuse to listen to our advice and the goodness, guidance and righteousness that we call them to, then be aware that you will lose this Crusade.” This professed zeal for death over life has for years been a common, blood-curdling refrain appearing throughout the pronouncements issued by myriad tentacles of the radical Islamist death cult. These fanatics repeatedly demonstrate that they take it deadly seriously. (Read, for instance, 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta’s chilling instructions for his final hours on Earth. A sample: “Shout, ‘Allahu Akbar,’ because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers. … When the hour of reality approaches, the zero hour … wholeheartedly welcome death for the sake of [Allah]”).AMERICA MUST CONFRONT THE AXIS OF AGGRESSORSAt the conclusion of his homicidal missive, bin Laden warned his targets to understand why they are in the crosshairs: “This is our message to the Americans, as an answer to theirs. Do they now know why we fight them and over which form of ignorance, by the permission of Allah, we shall be victorious?” Indeed, many of us do know why they fight us, because they’ve told us. Yet some in our midst deliberately obfuscate and even mock that truth. Many of those exact same people wag their fingers about “Islamophobia” whenever people notice how radical Islamist ideology is utterly steeped in, well, Islam. If they object to radical Islamism’s sick predations and believe that warped project to be a terrible abuse of a peaceful faith, perhaps they’d be better served resisting the abusers, rather than berating its resisters as ignorant bigots.