We were sitting in a coffee shop downtown, I and Wael Abbas and Nasser Noury (a photographer for Reuters) and Mohammed El Sharkawy and others. A colleague joined us and told us that in front of Cinema Metro on Talaat Harb Street sexual assaults were taking place and that the cinema's ticket window had been vandalized.

[Australian mufti] Hilaly's view is not unique, it's commonplace among Muslim leaders but not unique to Muslims. In Hilaly's universe and the universe of religious leaders like him, women are always the ones who provoke sexual assaults. Tight clothing is blamed, loose mores, etc are blamed.

Incidents like this reveal the fundamental reality that it has nothing to do with the women as individuals at all, with anything they do or don't do, just with the fact that they are women who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Let's take a step back to Hilaly's mentor and the founder of modern Islamic radicalism, the godfather of Al Queda, Hamas and nearly every radical Sunni Islamic organization that dates back to the Muslim Brotherhood; Sayyid Qutb. Sayyid, like many radical Muslims, was well educated and had spent time in the West.

He received his Master's Degree in Education at the Colorado State College. He returned full of deranged ramblings about the Jews controlling the world, Americans being obsessed with mowing lawns and sex. His attitude neatly captures the frustrated psychotic behavior of the mobs in Cairo as well as its flip side, the radical Islamists because in the end they are one and the same.

Sayyid Qutub attended a Church sock hop at Colorado's Greely Church and as the pastor put on, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" in the gramophone, Sayyid Qutb began to literally seethe inside. He wrote of the incident later. "They danced to the tunes of the gramophone, 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.

Of American women, Sayid Qutb wrote; "The American girl 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 shows all this and does not hide it."

At least one reason for radical Muslims to hate Jews is for the invention of psychiatry. One that makes it quite clear that Sayyid Qutb was not writing about American women but himself, not about the sock hop but his physical reaction to it. A reaction that he projected onto the objects of his desire. In this same way Qutb and his radical students who include Al Queda's Number 2, Ayman Al Zawahiri, project their own desires on America and Israel.

When they talk about Jews wanting to run the world or America wanting to enslave Muslims, what they really mean is they want to run the world and they want to enslave all Muslims under a single caliphate. That kind of projection is at the heart of Islamic rationalization which says the man isn't responsible for rape because the fact that he desires the women, proves she seduced him and the fact that he hates the West proves that the West is out to get him.

In an inverted moral universe the victims are the perpetrators not because of anything they did but because they have been victimized. The very fact that they were victimized, is used as proof of their culpability. This was the attitude taken through the 19th and 20th centuries towards the massacres and persecution of Jews well into the Holocaust. Indeed many Anti-semitic tracts used that and continue to use it as their argument, stating that the very persecution of the Jews proved that Jews had done something to enrage so many people.

Whenever liberals highlight the Arab Street argument telling us how much of the Muslim world is upset at America, they're playing into the same idea as Hilaly, using Muslim anger as proof that we are guilty. If they're angry at us, it must mean we're at fault for angering them.