"One should read about the life of Sayyid Qutb, intellectual architect of the Muslim Brotherhood that we now apparently wish to embrace. He hated the very thought of Jews, though he had seen few if any in Egypt, and was only to encounter them in any real number in America. This middle-class Egyptian—subsidized generously by his own government, treated well and embraced by Americans—grew to detest the West for its liberality, its equality of the sexes, its material wealth, its friendship with the Jews.
In other words, his wretched life reminds us that envy, jealousy, anger at lost stature, these primordial emotions fuel jihadism. They may be enhanced by general misery, acerbated by statist failures and authoritarian governments, but ultimately the nihilist rages are attributable to the lethal mix of Middle East tribalism and Islam’s utter failure to account for and live with modernity.
Thinking that radical Islam will soften itself or evolve is analogous to a victorious Confederacy voluntarily ending slavery about 1870, a kinder, gentler Soviet Union without the gulags, Hitler in his dotage dismantling Auschwitz, or Tojo in the 1950s turning his old zeal to flooding the Co-Prosperity Sphere with cars and radios." Gazitis
http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/2007/06/21/
Absolutely right. If you go back to the very beginning of Wahhabism, you find the some motivational factors- envy, jealousy, anger at lost stature. I would add one more- the excruciating feeling that other people might be having fun and you aren't.
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