Trump, religion, sex, and perhaps the worst commentary on 9/11 so far this year.
Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times grandee and occasional contributor to New York–based periodicals, has submitted his way of commemorating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. There are lots of angles a committed progressive could take. O’Toole decided that the American president’s commemorating the anniversary is informed by the same exact misogyny that motivates jihadist terrorism.
O’Toole starts with Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian fundamentalist who studied in Colorado in the late 1940s and reacted poorly to the position of women and the relative liberty of sexual relations in America. O’Toole gives us a long account of Qutb’s disgust at a church-sponsored dance at which Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was played. Then, O’Toole talks about how jihadis want to control women’s bodies just as Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth do, or something.
I think the more natural analogy would place Hegseth in the role of the pastor hosting the church social. But O’Toole is of the intellectual conviction that all religious views about sex are roughly the same: “There is nothing uniquely Islamic about the fanatical desire to control women’s bodies. Little versions of Qutb could have been found in 1950s Ireland too, foaming at the mouth about dirty dancing.”
Of course there is something unique about Islam, which is why Muslims have been scandalized by the treatment of women under Christendom since the foundation of the religion. There are plentiful accounts of Muslims marveling that Frankish soldiers stationed in the Crusader state allowed their uncovered wives to accompany other men in public. For O’Toole, however, Qutb represents only a “twisted” form of Islam — which is the same as the regular kind of Irish Catholicism.
As for Trump, who famously controls the disco music on Mar-A-Lago’s patio from an iPad, it’s harder to think of any figure in modern American life whose reaction to a church social in the 1940s would have been more antithetical to Qutb’s. If anything, Trump would find it too wholesome, and lame, and controlled. Trump appointed a few Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, but, on the whole, his election has coincided with a massive wave of secularization in American politics. He even continued teasing his first vice president for being stridently anti-abortion. Trump is pro-choice, pro-surrogacy. His rise, like the influence of cable television, has given America’s conservative movement the moral atmosphere of a beer commercial aired during a football game.
As my colleague Dan McLaughlin observed when I shared O’Toole’s brain cramp of a column with him, “I could picture Donald Trump doing a lot of bad things, but knocking down a Manhattan skyscraper is just about dead last on the list.”