Distant Grievances

Reuel Marc Gerecht writes in the Weekly Standard:

Europe's radical-mosque practitioners can appear, mutatis mutandis, like a Muslim version of the hard-core intellectuals and laborers behind the aggrieved but proud Scottish National party in its salad days. These young men are often Sunni versions of the Iranian radicals who gathered around the jumbled, deeply contradictory, religious left-wing ideas of Ali Shariati, one of the intellectual fathers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's "red-mullah" revolution of 1979, and the French-educated ex-Communist Jalal Al-e Ahmad, who became in the 1960s perhaps the most famous theoretician of Muslim alienation in the Western world.

...

The thousands of Iranians who gleefully went to their deaths in suicidal missions against the Iraqis in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war did so in part, as the Franco-Iranian scholar Farhad Khosrakhavar has written, because the "liberty to die as a martyr served to maintain the phantasm of revolutionary possibilities. Death is both the ultimate expression of a very Western idea of individual freedom and self-creation and a very Islamic conception of self-abnegation before God's will. Talk to young radical Muslims in Europe--young men who in all probability have no desire whatsoever to kill themselves or others for any cause--and you can often nevertheless find an appreciation of the idea of martyrdom almost identical to the Iranian death-wish of yesteryear. In the last three centuries, Europe has given birth and nourishment to most of mankind's most radical causes. It shouldn't be that surprising to imagine that Europe could nurture Islamic militancy on its own soil."

We are looking at the mutation of a virus. The intolerance and finality of Islam is being blended with the language and grievances of Marxist revolution, and if we don't find some way to stop it, Europe is going to explode in flames.