But then these are strange times. On the evening of September 11, 2001, you might’ve expected responsible-minded, in-the-know public servants, journalists, and academic Islam experts throughout the Western world to start giving their respective publics a crash course (as it were) in Islamic jihad, so as to ensure that absolutely everybody understood exactly why those men wanted to take down those buildings. Instead, the President of the United States, the Karen Armstrongs and John Espositos, and virtually the entire Western media were quick to begin issuing fervent assurances that the terrorists were a fanatical minority who’d hijacked not only airplanes but Islam itself. Similar assurances followed hard upon every major terrorist act in the succeeding years. Those of us who knew better – who recognized that the terrorists were doing exactly what the Koran ordered them to do, and who believed that it was vitally important for everyone in the West to understand this – began to see our names yanked to a term that identified us not as people who were seeking to educate and inform but as antagonists of something to which every one of us, after all, should be opposed.
Think of it. If there was going to be such a term, every freedom-loving person in the Western world should’ve been eager to see the word “counterjihadist” appended to his or her name after 9/11. The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, after all, were jihadist acts. Ditto the later assaults on London, Madrid, Bali, Mumbai, and so on. How can you not be against all that, and proud of it?
But no: the Western cultural elite managed to turn “counterjihadist” into a dirty word. One of the weirdest things of all, perhaps, is that when what is now known as the “counterjihad movement” is mentioned by those who despise it, the topic of jihad itself is usually nowhere in sight. It’s invisible. It’s irrelevant. It’s as if we critics of jihad were opposed to an entirely imaginary enemy – like mermaids or leprechauns. More
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