Dear Paul Berman: It's the Islam, Mr. Smartypants

Paul Berman's analysis of the appeal of "the Islamist death cult" is good as far as it goes. Unfortunately, it doesn't go nearly far enough. Which is to say that Sayyid Qutb, the brains behind the Muslim Brotherhood--Berman, cleverly, calls him the Martin Heidegger of Islamism--didn't reinvent the wheel. He went back to the wheel--i.e. the source material of Islam's core texts--and dredged it up for a modern audience.

Berman's problem: he fails to locate the Islam in "Islamism," seeing the latter as a manifestation of 20th Century totalitarianism and therefore divorced from its source.

Update: CAIR Makes New Push to Get Media to Scrub Word "Islamist"

Dear CAIR: IslamistIslamistIslamistIslamistIslamistIslamistIslamistIslamist...