"...
Waller R. Newell claims that to understand Osama Bin Laden we ought to remind ourselves of the work of Heidegger, a Nazi who inspired several generations of European leftists. Heidegger is part of a tradition of nihilistic romanticism that can be trace via Nietzsche and Marx and Fichte all the way back to Rousseau. A key theme is the total destruction of existing bourgeois societies and their replacement by a new authentic social order. Heidegger influenced French post-war Left apologists for Stalin and Mao such as Sartre, and via the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon whose book on the Third World The Wretched of the Earth (1961) it influenced Middle Eastern radicals.

Many of the leaders of the Shiite revolution in Iran that deposed the Shah had studied Fanon's brand of Marxism. The Sorbonne educated Ali Shari'at – who many consider to be the intellectual father of the Shiite revolution - translated "The Wretched of the Earth" and Sartre's "Being and Nothingness into Persian." Inspired by Fanon, such figures as Lin Piao, ideologist of the Red Guards in China, and Pol Pot, justified revolution as a therapeutic act by non-Western peoples. Violence exposes the egoism and hedonism of bourgeois societies, and facilitates the creation of a new world based upon collective self-sacrifice. By destroying existing power structures they will regain the dignity lost due to Western oppression and materialism, selfishness, and immorality.

Many elements in the ideology of al Qaeda – see the 1996 Declaration of War Against America by Bin Laden – rely upon the same analysis. While Pol Pot sought to return Cambodia back to Year Zero, Osama bin Laden dreams of returning to the supposed purity of Seventh Century Islam.

Osama bin Laden is poorly educated in Islamic theology. A wealthy playboy in his youth, he fell under the influence of radical Arab intellectuals who blended calls for Marxist revolution with calls for a pure Islamic state. Many, such as Sayyid Qutb in Egypt, a key figure in Islamic fundamentalism, were executed. His followers compared the coming Islamic revolution to the French and Russian revolutions. The influence of Sayyid Qutb's Signposts on the Road (1964) is clearly traceable in pronouncements by Islamic Jihad. The tract by Yasser Arafat's terrorist organization Al Fatah The Revolution and Violence, the Road to Victory has been called "a selective précis of 'The Wretched of the Earth.'
..."
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/006350.html
[I got linked from http://www.instapundit.com/]