Many learned analysts continue to insist that if the U.S. would only modify its policies regarding Israel, the global jihad would end. Here, Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald places the ongoing jihad against Israel in its larger context:
The Arab war against Israel is a classic Jihad. It can be called the Lesser Jihad, and began before the advent of OPEC oil money, and the mass migration of Muslims behind Infidel (enemy) lines. It began because Israel is in the midst of the dar al-Islam and is an Infidel state run by the heretofore despised Jews — a particularly intolerable affront.
But the Lesser Jihad against Israel is merely a subset of the Greater Jihad against non-Muslims in general; it is not, as appeasers of the Throw-Israel-to-the-Wolves variety argue, a substitute for it. The larger Infidel world is now subject to what can no longer be hidden: the classic Jihad to spread Islam until it covers the globe, and Islam and Muslims everywhere dominate. To many non-Muslims, this seems to be a fantastic dream. But it is not. Do the demographic math. In Holland, thirty years ago, there were 15,000 Muslims. Today, there are one million — and the country is a much more unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous place as a result, and the Dutch do not know what to do.
In France, there are 5-7 million Muslims. Some “integrate.” Some (especially Berbers) even leave Islam. But most do not. And there is always the possibility that the seemingly well-integrated may, for obscure as well as obvious reasons, and for personal as well as larger political reasons, “revert” to “immoderate” Islam. The same is true in Great Britain, Spain, Germany, and Belgium. Italy seems, for various peculiar reasons, the least likely to exhibit appeasement. Andreotti, that famous crook, was pro-Arab and anti-Israel merely out of the usual financial considerations, and not, one suspects, out of some failure to understand Islam: he was too intelligent for that, but may have suppressed his understanding because he felt the Arabs were too rich to offend, and he could not conceive that Islam was a civilizational threat — possibly out of contempt for Islam itself.
Though very few would recognize it, the Infidels of Europe in fact owe the Israelis a debt. For it is the Israelis who, like a lightning rod, have until recently borne the brunt of Arab and Muslim hatred and attention. Only now, with the first feeble moves to constrain Islam and Muslm power in Europe (and the word “feeble” fits), are some in Europe beginning to look at the history of Jihad, to read Bat Ye’or on the treatment of non-Muslims, and to rediscover the texts.
These texts show that Jihad is not an intermittent but a constant feature of Islam, that it is not tangential but central, and that whenever Jihad seemed to disappear as a motivating force, it was only because Muslims were in a state either of contented ignorance about the outside world (as in a village under Ottoman rule), or were too obviously lacking in the wherewithal to conduct Jihad. But neither of those conditions, which alone explain the absence of the call to Jihad, any longer obtains. Now the wherewithal exists; it is the revenues from an accident of geology. The knowledge of the non-Muslim world also exists; indeed, Muslims have been permitted by non-Muslims to move en masse behind what the Muslims at least (or most of them) can only regard as enemy lines — without that enemy comprehending what it has done to itself.
The Lesser Jihad against Israel is simply part of the Greater Jihad against all non-Muslims. And so are those other Lesser Jihads, such as that carried on against Hindus in Pakistan, where they have been persecuted and driven out; in Bangladesh — ditto; in the Indian-controlled parts of Kashmir; and in India itself. Muslims view these various local jihads as related. They have no hesitation in mouthing over and over again the list: Palestine, Iraq, Kashmir, Bosnia, and so on. These are the places where the Infidels are militarily superior. But there are other Jihads within countries where the Muslims have been and remain superior. Such, for example, is the campaign of murder against Christians in the Sudan; the persecution and smaller-scale massacres in Nigeria (the “Jihad” against the Ibos and other Christians led to the declaration by the latter of their independence), with the Biafran War leading to a million Ibo deaths; and the jihad in Indonesia, where the war against the Christians first in East Timor — illegally seized by Indonesia — and then in the Moluccas and other islands continues wherever and whenever it can.
This is exactly what Arabs and Muslism, though they see the connections, do not wish the Infidels to see. They do not want us to read what is stated in Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira about Infidels and what is to be done, or what in fact was done, to them. They do not want you to read about the real (as opposed to the falsified) history of the treatment of all non-Muslims — Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, under Muslim rule.
Western students of the origins of Islam have no difficulty showing that the belief-system is a mixture of pre-Islamic Arab pagan lore, with stories and figures appropriated, often in distorted fashion, from both Judaism and Christianity. It was the perfect vehicle for justifying Arab conquest and promoting further conquest: something that “looked familiar” to those who were richer and culturally more advanced but militarily less organized and powerful. Some of those could be convinced over time that this uncreated and eternal belief-system was the true version of their inferior, distorted religions (Judaism, Christianity). This view, combined with the steady pressure of the cruel status of the dhimmi, inevitably led over time to a falling-away from the dhimmis’ original beliefs and their acceptance of Islam — not by all, not even by most, but steadily, a little all the time. And when one combines the grim legal status of non-Muslims with the physical insecurity, the mass killings that could occur whenever a local Muslim population was whipped up (as with the massacre of all the Jews of Granada in 1066) and whenever it could be claimed that this or that non-Muslim was not complying with the rules that governed the “protected peoples,” the entire non-Muslim community to which such an individual belonged could be made to pay the price.
When will a sufficient number of people in the Western world, in the press and television, and in governments, begin to fully grasp that Islam is not merely a religion but a geopolitical program for conquest?