What Do Today's Radical Islamists Share With the Ancient Greeks and Trojans?

In spite of the legacy of the Golden Age of Greece that gave us much of our civilization, they, too, had a dark side, one to which today's Islamists could easily identify:

Radical Islamists today—like ancient Achilles—are dominated by their rage and hatred. Add to that envy of the West, which is heir to classical Greece. We see in their obsession with abusing and mutilating the bodies of dead enemies and cutting of the heads of the innocent a reflection of the wrath portrayed by Homer that has brought pains a thousand-fold upon the Middle East.

Further, Islamists share with Bronze-Age Greeks an obsession with religion. When those Greeks got ideas in their heads, it was the gods who were whispering them in their ears. When they showed courage or succumbed to fear, it was often the gods who prompted them. They saw their fates in the hands of the gods; they sought the gods' favor and acted in the names of the gods.

Similarly, Islamists are immersed in a primitive theistic mindset. God is responsible for all things. It is through the will of Allah that everything happens and in the name of Allah that they commit the most heinous crimes imaginable. Allah is as real to them as Zeus, Poseidon and Ares were to the warriors before the walls of Troy. But, of course, all of those gods were simply in their heads, not in Olympus or heaven.

From Edgar Hudgins at the Objectivist Center

They will drag us back into the sludge of ignorance and barbarity as they attempt to snuff out the light of our civilization...in the name of Allah.