Jihad, the struggle against Infidels who put up resistance to the spread and dominance of Islam, is a central and permanent duty imposed on Believers by the texts and tenets of Islam. Sometimes it can be fulfilled as a collective duty, where some participate actively and the rest merely lend support. Some circumstances require a Believer to participate individually and directly, and not merely to support, in any number of ways, others who might participate.
Jihad does not employ terrorism alone, or even mainly. Qitaal, or military combat, was always the traditional and most obvious way that Islam was spread. And what we correctly identify as “terrorism” is what most Muslims would describe as a form of qitaal. As for the other instruments of Jihad, they have proven in modern circumstances far more effective than qitaal.
And besides, the Infidels have superior military technology, which is one of the things that Muslims from Al-Qaradawi to Mohamed Mahathir keep deploring before Muslim audiences. These instruments include the clever deployment of the money weapon (a weapon only made possible in recent decades through the sudden, quite unmerited, oil revenues); the campaigns of Da’wa that can now be conducted because large numbers of Muslims were permitted, in an act of criminal negligence by Western elites, to settle deep within Infidel lands, behind what Muslims themselves have always been taught to regard as enemy lines, the lines that delineate Dar al-Harb; and the demographic conquest which can be seen all over Western Europe, and which is not leading to a widespread acceptance by Muslims of the legitimacy of the Infidel nation-state, or of its laws and political institutions and social arrangements. But those laws and political institutions are being exploited and manipulated in an attempt to insure that Islam sets down permanent roots and is able to keep up steady, growing pressure on the Infidel nation-state, whose existence and laws and customs flatly contradict, and are contradicted by, the tenets of Islam.
The “schadenfreude” of the Arabs will quickly evanesce when the Americans withdraw from Iraq, allowing the Camp of Islam to be forced to endure its own fissures, without the spectacle of expensive, depleting, vain American attempts to hold things in check. It can be diminished by other actions that can and must be undertaken by sensible leaders, who unlike Bush will have to have familiarized themselves with Islam’s texts and tenets and attitudes and atmospherics, and from that familiarity construct unsentimental policies. No more “ordinary moms and dads” who want “freedom”; no more nonsense about reaching out to help make a better world for Muslims, no more nonsensical payments of tens of billions to Muslim states and societies by Infidels, no more naive faith in the basic goodness of Islam which has been mysteriously “hijacked” by “extremists,” no more ignorance of one’s own past that allows a leader to claim that Iraq is just like the young American Republic, no more of any of this utter crap that we have had at such great cost, to endure because our current President, and some of his loyalists, far from being tough on Islam, are not nearly tough, or far-seeing, or comprehending, enough.
Let us find ways to experience that schadenfreude the Arabs and other Muslims are now experiencing at the spectacle of America stuck to Tarbaby Iraq. Let’s get quickly unstuck, and forget about any of those who tell us “we owe the Iraqis” this or “we owe the Sunni regimes” that. We owe none of them anything.
Long past time to replace the obstinately stupid with the imaginative, intelligent, and relentless people necessary for the task, without end, at hand — the task of constraining the forces of those who participate in, or support, or defend, or potentially could participate in, or support, or defend, the Jihad directed at Infidels everywhere in the world, from southern Thailand to southern Sudan to southern Nigeria to southern France and southern England, and all the way to North America, where only the Atlantic moat has managed to limit the flow, and therefore the local size, of the worldwide problem that comes from the texts and tenets of Islam.
Such people already exist. Others can be so fashioned. Find them. Make use of them.