Those Notorious Greeley Girls

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Published by Political Grind - August 13, 2007
http://politicalgrind.com/2007/08/13/those-notorious-greeley-girls/
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"Short of adopting Shariâ law, nothing would appease these Islamists!"
--Faultline USA
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When you're right, you're right. As unpleasant as it may be, I think it's finally time for us to face up to the facts and issue some apologies. A more thorough examination of the historical evidence appears to support what the liberals have been telling us all along -- that we Americans were, indeed, responsible for the rise of radical Islam.

There, I've said it and I feel better now.

Of course, I'm not referring to those controversial actions of our present war mongering Bush administration. Nor even those awkward missteps of that bumbling Clintonian gang. No, we're not talking here about Reagan or Carter or any of the preceding administrations or any of their misguided foreign policy blunders. This has little to do with any of our politicians or statesmen or generals or religious leaders.

In fact, the likely instigators in this sordid affair held no major governmental posts whatsoever. And while many of them, although somewhat 'on in years' are still with us, they probably won't be found anywhere near Washington D.C. Rather, they're spread all across America, living out their quiet normal lives in virtual anonymity, neatly tucked into their warm quilted comforters.

Who, then, are these mysterious Golden-agers? And what did they do that so infuriated the peaceful Muslim ummah and set the Middle East ablaze?

They are, God bless them, the notorious Greeley Girls. And what they did was dance. And their dancing changed our world.

The facts of the story are as follows. In 1948, a relatively unknown author and minor administrator from the Egyptian Ministry of Education was sent to the United States to study our educational system. A shy, quiet, somewhat droopy little man, with an almost comical Charlie Chaplin moustache, his name was Sayyid Qutb (pronounced 'kut-tib'). Unfortunately for the fastidious Mister Qutb, his unhappy sojourn in America would prove to be more than a classic case of culture shock; it would soon become a deeply traumatic experience from which he would never fully recover.

By 1950, Qutb had made his way to that infamous hotbed of sin and licentiousness, Greeley, Colorado, where he enrolled at Colorado State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Colorado. Although forty-two years old, the hyper-sensitive and deeply pious Sayyid was, by all accounts, still a virgin. And evidently, almost everything about the 1950s free-wheeling Greeley cultural scene deeply shocked him and offended his tender sensibilities.

He found Americans brash, materialistic, immoral and self-indulgent. He was astonished by the Greeleyite's apparent obsession with their well-manicured green lawns, and their ungoverned drinking of alcohol and wanton indulgence in hedonistic pleasures. He found the men to be shallow and brutal, their sports, football, wrestling and boxing, savage and pointless, and their ignorance of the world profound.

But Qutb saved his most vicious and vehement condemnations for those pretty Greeley coeds.

"The American girl," he would later write in his book 'The America I Have Seen', "is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs -- and she knows all this and does not hide it."

Whew! Thirsty lips and shapely thighs -- those Greeley Girls must have been pretty hot stuff. We can just picture these promiscuous bobby-soxers, provocatively sauntering about the Colorado State campus in their ankle-length plaid skirts and sexy penny loafers. No wonder poor Sayyid was so scandalized. But, for our Twentieth-Century Savonarola there was still worse to come.

Qutb devoted some of his most lurid and lascivious purple prose attempting to describe what he perceived to be the Greeley Girls most wanton debauchery -- their sensual and suggestive dancing. "They danced to the tunes of the gramophones, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire..."

For those of you who weren't around, or those who may have forgotten, the most popular record of 1950 was that catchy little alphabetical love song "'A' - You're adorable", sung by Perry Como and the Fontane Sisters. Also big that year was "The Tennessee Waltz", by Patti Page and the immortal "Mona Lisa", by Nat "King" Cole. The big bands of the 30s and 40s were starting to fade away but the Tommy Dorsey Band was still around and still drew large crowds of enthusiastic fans. Doris Day was hugely popular, and Frank Sinatra was just beginning his epic journey to stardom. A new age of "bebop" jazz was being ushered in by talented musicians like trumpeter Miles Davis and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, whose intricately-scored and heavily-orchestrated new recordings were heralded as the "Birth of the Cool".

Yet somehow, in the midst of all this soulless hedonism, between June 1948 and May 1949 the Great Satan had managed to extricate itself from its frenetic self-indulgence long enough to have flown 278,228 flights into Soviet-blockaded Berlin carrying over 2 million tons of food and supplies which, at the cost of 31 American lives, most likely saved a whole generation of Berliners from starvation and possible death. And somehow, this decadent self-centered nation managed to find the time to vote 5.43 billion 1950 dollars in foreign assistance to help some of its former enemies to rebuild war-ravaged Europe.

Of course, in Sayyid Qutb's moral ledger book, all of this Yankee magnanimity would count for little. For, he had seen the notorious Greeley Girls dance, and that was all he needed to see.

In 1951, Qutb returned to Egypt and became a leader of the fundamentalist, anti-Western Muslim Brotherhood. Considered one of the most influential Islamic theorists, his writings would become the theoretical basis for radical Islam. Eventually, Sayyid Qutb was accused of plotting against the Egyptian government and imprisoned. He was executed in 1966.

Among his many pupils and ardent followers was Ayman Zawahiri, who would later become mentor to Osama bin Laden.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

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Comments transposted from Political Grind:
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Debbie Hamilton
Sounds like he needed to get laid, doesn't it? I've said all along, at the root of Islamic terror and hatred is the silly restrictions placed upon the people by the religion itself.

Very nice article and thanks for sharing.

Debbie
Right Truth
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Spree
spree here--- EXCELLENT PIECE. I knew I liked you from your comments and now I see why.
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Stuart Jones
This is an excellent post. I think the point of it is to illustrate how extremely sexually repressed many Muslims are, and the way that distorts their view of the Western World. The whole tone of the article is sarcastic, as a way of illustrating absurdity. As a matter of perspective it is important to note that the actions described here took place in 1948. A time widely regarded later as one of innocence, sexism, naivete� and sexual repression. My mother was college class of 1949 and she wasn�t even allowed to be seen on campus in her gym shorts, as that would be considered improper for a lady. These were the days of Ozzie and Harriet, decades before the sexual revolution of the 1960�s or the mass marketing of pornography in the 1970�s.

There is a Muslim woman who works in my office who never shows any flesh except her face and hands. It was 100F here last week and most of the women in the office wore shorts, sleeveless tops and sandals. Our office is air conditioned, yet one still has to walk across a big asphalt parking lot to come and go and, even with A/C, I could feel the heat; yet the Muslim woman stayed covered up. The Muslim men in the office dressed for comfort, along with the rest of us. This obvious double standard is directly contrary to the past century of the evolving roles of the sexes in the West. Even in Victorian times, Western women weren�t that modest.

It seems that traditional Islamic society has a difficult time dealing with sexuality. In all public gatherings, women and men sit separately. In the extreme case of Afghanistan in the 1990�s, wounded Taliban warriors would rather die than be treated by a female doctor. Women weren�t allowed to leave their homes without a man. They were required to cover themselves head-to-toe in public. Rape victims were stoned to death for being unclean. The penalty for adultery was death for the woman. Women were worse than second class citizens. They were indeed treated as less than dogs, all in the name of Islam. This wasn�t just a foreign culture; it was misogyny taken to a murderous extreme.

I have asked Muslims on many occasions about the modesty and the segregation. Their answer is to explain that seeing women�s hair or legs would be distracting to the men. It would also send the wrong signal that the woman is of loose morals. It is understandable how someone raised in that society would be surprised by the Greeley Girls.

It is worth noting that it is a matter of great debate as to whether or not the Koran requires these practices. Like the tradition of men wearing beards, much of this seems to be a matter of tradition and culture, rather than religion. In pre-revolutionary Iran, in Egypt and in today�s Turkey many women dress in Western attire.

Fundamentalist Islam is an extremist movement who want the whole world to return to the ways and attitudes of 7th century Arabia. They may seem crazy, but they are willing to kill and die to achieve their ends. I personally could not imagine women in the West living this way and I would not want to live in a world like that. We all have to face the ugly reality that militant fundamentalist Islam has to be stopped, by reason and logic if possible, by force if necessary.
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Roger Gardner
The point I was trying to make with Greeley Girls was that, short of changing our entire culture and adopting Shari'a law, there was nothing we could do to escape the subsequent wrath of the Islamists. Stuart Jones seemed to come the closest to understanding this. I was going to write some positive comments to his Bush piece, but after seeing his complimentary comments on my Greeley Girls, I'm afraid it would look a little incestuous.
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Faultlineusa
Excellent article and so well-written. Pure quality! You are exactly right. Short of adopting Shariâ law, nothing would appease these Islamists!
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Crossposted to Faultline USA - August 23, 2007
C:\Documents and Settings\HP_Administrator\My Documents\Published articles & comments\Faultline USA Those Notorious Greeley Girls.mht

Crossposted to Chron Watch Forum - December 23, 2007
http://www.chronwatch-america.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47794