Bernard-Henri Lévy's Eurocentric Explanation Overlooks the Islamic Core of "Jihadism"

I appreciate that professional intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy is a really smart guy, but I fear his analysis of the root cause of "jihadism" is missing a key element. (Hat tip: MW)
 
Lévy told a packed crowd in NYC the other day that today's jihad is but the latest manifestation of--wait for it--European fascism:

Jihadism did not fall from the sky. It came from the past. And you cannot explain the fame of Jihadism today if you do not go back to the 1920s. Fascism enflamed Europe, Japan, and the Arab world. You had a wing of Nazism in the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in the late 1920s as a part of this fascist movement. The big difference between Europe and Iran, Syria, Egypt and Palestine, is that in Europe, after the defeat of Nazism, there was work of mourning, and memory and action to eradicate this plague. One of the problems of the Arab world is that the work was not only not done, it was not even begun. It remains in Hamas, it remains in the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda. The last pearl dropped by the oyster of fascism is ISIS.

That's good as far as it goes, M. Levi, but what also remains in Hamas and all the others--what, in fact, inspires them and lends credence, they believe, to all their efforts--is the jihad imperative, a core component of supremacist Islam. And that root cause predates European fascism by many, many centuries, even if it married up with it, to a degree, all those years later.

 

Unless one understands that, one understands rien.