Look, Confucius isn’t going to waste your time with a lot of “gee, Homeland Security sucks,” “how did the Dutch let this guy on the plane [without a passport?],” or maunderings about the lethality of the Obama Amateur Hour. They go without saying, especially among our readership.

However, there are a couple observations about Abû-Flamingpântsî, the Nigerian al-Qâ’ida sympathizer or operative who tried to take down NWA 253, which might shed a little light on the Islamist threat with which we’re faced.

First, he was a wealthy, privileged, educated son of the West as much as he was a “Nigerian Muslim.” His affinity for “Islam” as he understands it surely did not come from a village imam outside Abuja, but from Londonistan’s fervid atmosphere among alienated expatriates (many South Asian). His alienation was likely that of an adolescent, an expatriate, and a racial minority, compounded by Western self-loathing and the morally preening “Occidentalism” he encountered throughout his higher education alongside the basic Hegelian-Marxist idea of history.

The righteous are allowed any and all means—murder, rapine, terror, suicide—they’re all sacrifices on the pyramid of Utopiopochtli.From there, it’s a short hop to Islamism, which simply displaces the proletariat (or the Volk) with the umma, the bourgeoisie (or the Juden) with the kuffâr, and interprets history as an apocalyptic clash in which Utopia (Communism, the Thousand-Year Reich, the return of the Mahdi) will be ushered in when the Good (the former) defeats the Evil (the latter) in a war so freighted with significance that the righteous are allowed any and all means—murder, rapine, terror, suicide—they’re all sacrifices on the pyramid of Utopiopochtli. In Islamism, the bloodthirstier verses of the Koran are enlisted to sacralize the ideology, and bam, you’ve got the bolsheviki and Sturmabteilung of the new century.

And an engineering student? Gormogon readers won’t be surprised.

Update: More?

The 25 suspects, of Pakistani and Somali descent, were radicalised in UK mosques.

Some had been to university and studied engineering or computer sciences.

How’s that for fitting the ŒV’s profile? Sometimes I surprise even myself…

Second update: David Pryce-Jones (in a typically well-written post) hits the same points as your Volgi:

• “Those who drive Islamism are almost all like Umar Mutallab, or Osama bin Laden, sons of men who have allowed them to grow up with unearned privilege.”
• “…the playboy element in what they do. The planning of suicide bombing – and to a lesser extent, its performance – has attracted a disproportionate number of qualified professionals, doctors, engineers, town planners and of course men who claim to be trained scholars of religion.”
• “There they find themselves without friends, lonely, in a culture that is not theirs.”
• “When such Muslims turn to jihad and suicide bombing they are only repaying with interest what they have learnt in lecture halls and Left-wing circles about the decadence and corruption of the West.”

Read his whole post and take to heart what we’re telling you: Islamism is not a product of traditional Muslim culture or religion. It draws on elements of it, but it is a parasitic ideology rooted in the Western philosophical tradition.

If you listen to those telling you “Islam is the problem,” you miss the real tree for the forest and your only options to defeat the problem become genocide or quarantine. Not only are those unacceptable and horrible, they miss the point. Islamists draw synergistically upon the more intolerant, militant schools of Islam (Wahhabism, Deobandism, etc.), and that is a real problem, but the fons et origo of the Islamism that is currently hell-bent on the West’s destruction is Sayyid Qutb (and before him Heidigger, Marx, Feuerbach, Hegel, et al.), not Muhammad (as problematic a exemplar as the latter is in many ways).

It is a lot more realistic and effective strategy to discredit this philosophy than to discredit Islam tout court. (Though if you insist on the latter, the place to look is the received narrative of Muhammad and the earliest caliphs.) If you want to defeat these folks, in the short term you have to convince them they can’t win, and in the long term that they’re wrong.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.