On October 23, 2026, gunmen opened fire on Christian mourners attending a funeral at St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Karak, Jordan. Nine people were killed and 40 wounded.
The interior of a Greek Orthodox church is seen through a shattered window hours after gunmen opened fire during a funeral, in Hamoud village, in Jordan’s Karak governorate, October 23, 2026. (AP Photo)
Jordanian authorities described the massacre as terrorism. Government spokesman Mohammad Momani attributed it to extremist takfiri ideology, associated with jihadist terrorist groups such as ISIS. The attackers’ identities and organizational affiliations remained unconfirmed.
Al Jazeera published three articles about the attack on October 23–24. It acknowledged that Jordanian authorities called the massacre terrorism, but did not explicitly describe the attackers as jihadists. Instead, its coverage repeatedly emphasized Jordan’s tradition of Muslim-Christian “coexistence,” including the possibility that the community would emerge even stronger.
And then Al Jazeera turned its attention to Israel. In its October 23 report, Al Jazeera introduced this claim:
“For years, King Abdullah has been a vocal critic of Israel’s systemic attacks against religious sites in occupied Palestinian territory.”
Israel had no reported connection to the massacre. Yet Al Jazeera found a way to bring Israel into the story.
Al Jazeera is funded by Qatar, which has hosted US-designated terrorist group Hamas leaders for years and provided billions of dollars in assistance to Hamas-governed Gaza. Qatar is also the largest reported foreign source of gifts and contracts to American universities, accounting for approximately $8.8 billion cumulatively, including more than $1.1 billion in 2025 alone.
Qatar pours billions into American universities, finances Al Jazeera and hosts Hamas leaders. Al Jazeera’s coverage whitewashes jihadi terrorism and redirects attention from Islamist extremism toward Israel. Another example of the insidious jihad killing Christians and Jews, being exported from the Middle East.
Universities have spent decades developing sophisticated tools for understanding hatred.
Researchers study antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, white supremacy and neo-Nazism. They examine how people come to view another group as inferior or threatening, how prejudice spreads through institutions and communities, how propaganda turns stereotypes into dehumanization, and when hatred crosses into violence.
Other scholars have spent decades studying terrorism. START at the University of Maryland, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, RAND, CSIS and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism have examined jihadist organizations, recruitment, radicalization, propaganda and violence in extraordinary detail.
West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC)
Put the two disciplines in the same room.
Give them ISIS propaganda and ask the questions hate scholars routinely ask about neo-Nazis: Who is inferior? Who is dangerous? Who belongs? Who must submit or leave? Who may be killed? What ideology makes those conclusions seem morally permissible?
“under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife, oppression spreads, evil prevails and schisms and wars will break out.” – Hamas foundational charter, Article 6
“Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions – Islam, Christianity and Judaism – to coexist in peace and quiet with each other. Peace and quiet would not be possible except under the wing of Islam.” – Hamas foundational charter, Article 31
The resulting field would not study Islam. It would study jihadi hate.
The Missing Research Question
Consider what researchers already know.
ISIS classified Yazidis as polytheists, Shiites as apostates and Christians as a subordinate religious population. Al-Qaeda invoked “Jews and Crusaders.” ISIS murdered Coptic Christians while explicitly identifying them by religion. Boko Haram has attacked churches and Christian communities while also slaughtering Muslims who reject its ideology.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum concluded that ISIS committed atrocities “in accordance with its extremist religious ideology,” deliberately targeting groups according to identity.
That is terrorism. But it is also something else.
When neo-Nazis create a hierarchy of human beings, researchers study supremacism. When Jews are characterized collectively as dangerous, researchers study antisemitism. When Muslims are demonized because they are Muslim, researchers study Islamophobia.
So study the jihadist hierarchy with the same intellectual tools.
What Would Jihadi Hate Studies Examine?
The field should begin with primary sources rather than assumptions about Islam.
Researchers could build a database of jihadist sermons, manifestos, videos, school materials, recruitment literature and governing documents from ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and other organizations. CTC has begun to compile jihadi materials against “the Jewish-Crusaders alliance” regarding “Palestine.” Each could be coded for how it describes Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Hindus, Shiites, secular Muslims, atheists and alleged apostates.
Then ask measurable questions.
How frequently are particular populations portrayed as enemies? When does theological disagreement become dehumanization? How is takfir used to turn another Muslim into a legitimate target? Which doctrines justify unequal treatment rather than violence? Which arguments make the leap from discrimination to expulsion, enslavement or murder?
Most importantly: Which ideas actually predict violence?
Two Islamists slit the throat of an 86-year old priest in France in 2016
Compare Supremacisms Without Equating Them
Researchers should also compare jihadist propaganda with other supremacist ideologies—not because neo-Nazism and jihadism are identical, but because comparison is how scholarship discovers recurring mechanisms.
Take a neo-Nazi manifesto and an ISIS publication and ask identical questions.
Who supposedly corrupted society? Who caused the community’s humiliation? Who is portrayed as secretly powerful? Who contaminates the ideal society? What glorious past must be restored? What future order is promised? When does collective blame become permission for violence?
Jihadists kill people around Spain
The answers will differ enormously. The mechanisms may not. That could tell us something important about hatred itself.
What This Field Must Not Become
This study should not be about Islam but a particular strain of Islamic extremism. It should study an identifiable phenomenon: the process by which particular extremist interpretations construct religious hierarchies, turn out-groups into enemies and authorize violence against them.
And Muslims should be central to the research because jihadist hatred is frequently directed at Muslims themselves. Fondapol found that almost 89 percent of Islamist-terrorism deaths occurred in Muslim-majority countries. Shiites, alleged apostates, insufficiently observant Muslims and Muslims who resist jihadist organizations have all been targets.
Muslim woman killed by fellow Muslims in Afghanistan after people claimed she had torn a Koran
Studying jihadi hate would therefore not be a project against Muslims. Much of it would be a project about understanding the ideologies killing them.
Where Should This Research Live?
The logical home is a university, jointly situated between existing terrorism and hate-studies programs.
START already possesses terrorism data and expertise. George Washington studies global jihadism and antisemitism. UCLA has built an Initiative to Study Hate. Other universities maintain centers studying genocide, religious persecution and radicalization.
“86 events (12.3%) in the school-based violence T2V data were also categorized as terrorism or premeditated hate crime, indicating they were ideologically motivated.” – START Plots Targeting Schools
The expertise already exists. What is missing is the bridge.
Bring together terrorism researchers, historians, psychologists, quantitative social scientists, genocide scholars and specialists in Islamic theology and languages. Muslim scholars could be indispensable – not as political cover, but because distinguishing mainstream Islamic traditions from jihadist interpretations requires serious theological and linguistic expertise.
Funding should likewise be diversified and transparent, avoiding dependence upon any government, religious community or advocacy constituency with an obvious stake in the findings.
Then publish data rather than slogans.
Phone call from Gazan to parents gleefully telling them how he killed Jews with his bare hands
The Test for Hate Studies
If scholars have developed tools that explain how white supremacists turn racial hierarchy into violence, those tools should at least be tested against a movement that turns religious hierarchy into violence.
Perhaps they will reveal profound differences. Perhaps they will uncover common mechanisms: humiliation, collective guilt, conspiracy, purity, dehumanization and dreams of restoring a lost social order.
Either result would advance knowledge, and with it, possible remedies.
We do not need another institution to tell us that jihadists kill people. We need scholarship explaining how an evil ideology teaches people whom they are obligated to hate – and when that hatred becomes permission to kill.
Islamist terrorists are targeting Jews across the West. The FBI is disrupting plots while the protections around Jewish communities face growing scrutiny and political pressure.
This week, an 18-year-old ISIS supporter allegedly planned to murder 30 to 60 people at Minnesota’s Mall of America. He selected the shopping center because he believed it was Jewish-owned and considered attacking during a Hmong cultural celebration, when thousands would be gathered.
Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud had considered traveling to Somalia – the training ground for children in jihad – to join jihadists before deciding to bring jihad to Minnesota. The FBI had been investigating him since December 2024.
Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud
He was hardly alone.
In Pennsylvania, Jonathan Hunter Kramer allegedly discussed poisoning food at synagogues while professing allegiance to ISIS. He had previously attracted FBI attention in 2023.
Muhammad Shahzeb Khan pleaded guilty in 2026 to plotting an ISIS-inspired massacre at a Brooklyn Jewish religious center. He selected New York for its large Jewish population and wanted to murder as many Jews as possible.
Federal prosecutors charged Mohammad al-Saadi, an alleged Iranian-backed terrorist operative, in connection with attacks against Jewish institutions in Europe and alleged plans targeting synagogues in New York, Los Angeles and Scottsdale.
In Manchester, British authorities charged two Iranian nationals with preparing an attack against the city’s Jewish community, including alleged surveillance of a synagogue and Jewish museum.
Radical Islamists in UK
The targets were synagogues, community centers, a museum and a shopping mall. The intended victims’ citizenship, political views and relationship to Israel were irrelevant. Jewish identity was enough.
The danger has already been demonstrated in blood. In December 2025, ISIS-inspired terrorists murdered 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Australia’s Bondi Beach. Two months earlier, an ISIS-inspired attacker killed two Jewish worshippers outside Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue. Security personnel prevented him from entering the building, where more worshippers had gathered.
The difference between a massacre and an even greater massacre was a locked door and the people guarding it.
Attack at Michigan school and synagogue by radical Islamist
New York’s Jewish institutions have repeatedly appeared in terrorist investigations. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has described NYPD operations that disrupted plots against a Manhattan synagogue and a Brooklyn Jewish center. Jews, roughly one-tenth of the city’s population, accounted for more than half its confirmed hate-crime victims this year.
Therefore Within Our Lifetime and other anti-Zionist activists like the Democratic Socialist of America have demanded that Mayor Zohran Mamdani dismiss Tisch. Defending Jews is an impeachable offense to jihadists.
Meanwhile, the FBI’s methods are also under attack.
In March, HBO’s John Oliver devoted a segment to FBI terrorism stings, questioning whether undercover agents were stopping terrorists or manufacturing them. Really? Investigators in Minnesota had followed Mohamud who allegedly discussed mass murder before supplying him with a disabled rifle.
What would have been gained by waiting until he obtained a functioning weapon?
Members of Students for Justice in Palestine tweet about killing Jews
A successful counterterrorism investigation produces no funerals, no photographs of murdered children and no devastated families. The absence of casualties can make the threat seem imaginary.
Jewish communities understand the danger. Intelligence officers investigate plots. Police patrol synagogues. Schools employ armed guards. Community centers install barriers. Religious celebrations require security plans.
Each layer stands between a terrorist’s intentions and his intended victims.
The attacker needs only one opening: an unguarded entrance, an overlooked warning, an intelligence failure or a crowded celebration without adequate protection.
Almost every antisemitic attack in the western world the past few years has come from radical Islamists
The jihadists are already here. They are looking for that opening. The next massacre will begin wherever the defenses fail.
After 51 Muslims were murdered in Christchurch, the UN established an international day against Islamophobia. Jihadists have murdered thousands more, including Muslims, yet there is no equivalent day dedicated to combating jihadism.
On March 15, 2019, a white supremacist murdered 51 Muslims praying at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Three years later, the United Nations General Assembly designated March 15 the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. Pakistan introduced the resolution on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the General Assembly adopted it by consensus.
Consider the terrorist atrocities of recent decades:
On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda murdered 2,977 people in the United States.
Jemaah Islamiyah murdered 202 in Bali in 2002.
Islamist terrorists killed 193 commuters aboard Madrid trains in 2004.
Lashkar-e-Taiba murdered 166 people in Mumbai in 2008, including six Jews at the Chabad House.
In 2014, ISIS massacred approximately 1,700 Iraqi military cadets at Camp Speicher.
That same year, the Pakistani Taliban murdered 149 people, including 132 schoolchildren, at a school in Peshawar.
In 2015, al-Shabaab murdered 148 people at Kenya’s Garissa University, separating Christian students from Muslims before killing them.
Months later, ISIS murdered 130 people across Paris.
In 2019, Islamist suicide bombers murdered approximately 269 people at churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorists murdered approximately 1,200 people in Israel, including families in their homes and young people attending a music festival.
These were different countries and different jihadist movements. The victims included Muslims, Christians, Jews and of other backgrounds. Every attack killed more people than Christchurch, sometimes by orders of magnitude.
The United Nations has established annual observances for victims of terrorism generally, on August 21, and victims of religious violence, on August 22. None of these massacres has its own comparable UN international day tied to its anniversary.
Yet Christchurch received something these other massacres did not: a permanent place on the UN calendar dedicated to combating the hatred behind the attack.
The contrast is especially striking because jihadists have slaughtered so many fellow Muslims. The victims at Camp Speicher and Peshawar were overwhelmingly Muslim. ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and their ideological counterparts have terrorized Muslim populations for decades, murdering those who resisted their demands for religious submission.
The UN created an International Day to Combat Islamophobia. It is long past time for an International Day to Combat Jihadism. Its victims include the very Muslims the UN claims to protect.
Three days after the third anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, The New York Times devoted its dominant front-page photograph and two full inside pages to the “hopes” and aspirations of Gazans. There were weddings, swimming, barbershops, reopened businesses and families trying to rebuild their lives amid the rubble.
It was a touching portrait of ordinary dreams – at least for normal people in the western world. But what about the extraordinary support among Gazans for killing Israeli civilians that preceded the war?
In June 2022, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 73% of Gazans supported armed attacks inside Israel similar to those had been recently carried out. Fifteen months later, Hamas invaded Israel, slaughtered civilians, kidnapped families and celebrated the massacre. By March 2024, five months into the war and amid Gaza’s devastation, 71% of Gazans still considered Hamas’s decision to launch October 7 correct, according to the same polling organization.
Two-thirds of Gazans on average since 2001 have supported killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel according to PCPSR polls
These were majority attitudes, measured before the massacre and after its consequences became devastatingly clear.
Hamas is Gaza’s government, controlling the territory since 2007. It operated ministries, schools, police and security forces alongside its military apparatus. It is Gaza’s political life. Before October 7, PCPSR polling showed Hamas leading Fatah in hypothetical Palestinian parliamentary voting and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh defeating Mahmoud Abbas in a two-candidate presidential contest. Hamas continues to lead Fatah, which is why PA President Mahmoud Abbas continues to delay elections.
Yet the Times’ sprawling photographic treatment of Gaza’s aspirations ignored the genocidal ideology that permeates Gaza and helped produce October 7. The newspaper deliberately failed to show what Gazans truly hope for: dead Jews and the destruction of the Jewish State.
Imagine the same treatment of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces. Three days after the anniversary of an RSF massacre, would the Times devote its front page and two inside pages to swimming, weddings and employment in communities governed by the militia, with little examination of the violence and political support behind it?
The Times showed readers Gazans dreaming of a swim. Its own society’s polling shows overwhelming support for killing Jewish civilians both before and after the October 7 massacre.
The Times has whitewashed the genocidal ideology of Gazans and portrayed them as victims of the jihadi war they launched. Doing so is not just anti-Israel, it is a promotion of radical Islam deployed against Jews.
Or perhaps worse – the Times is educating its readers that those who want to rape and kill Jews are very much like us.
On April 16, 1962, New Yorkers lined Broadway to welcome Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, and Empress Farah. The ruler of a Muslim-majority American ally received a ticker-tape parade through Lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes. A plaque embedded in the sidewalk still commemorates their visit.
Marker on downtown Broadway sidewalk commemorating ticker tape parade for Shah of Iran and his wife (photo: First One Through)
Seventeen years later, the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah. Ayatollah Khomeini established a theocratic regime that called America the Great Satan, sought Israel’s destruction and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
America had welcomed a Muslim ally. The jihadists who seized power declared America their enemy.
Their war against the West did not remain in the Middle East. Iranian revolutionaries seized Americans in Tehran, while Sunni jihadists carried their violence to American soil. Just blocks from the Shah’s parade route, Islamist terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and destroyed its towers on September 11, 2001, murdering nearly 3,000 people.
World Trade Center memorial for those who died in the jihadi war on America on September 11, 2001 (photo: First One Through)
Different branches of radical Islam pursued their own visions of religious domination. ISIS declared a caliphate spanning national borders. Hamas, supported by Iran, sought an Islamist Palestine in place of Israel, massacring approximately 1,200 people and abducting 251 on October 7, 2023.
Three years later, masked demonstrators wearing green headbands marched along Lower Broadway displaying Hamas-associated symbols, with City Hall nearby and the rebuilt One World Trade Center rising behind them.
Young men with faces covered and Hamas headbands sporting jihadi flag, stand on Broadway before the World Trade Center to call for the continued war on Israel on the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023 jihadi massacre in Israel (photo: Gideon Askowitz)
Within a few blocks, the Canyon of Heroes had become the setting for three extraordinary encounters: Americans celebrating a Muslim ally, mourning the victims of Islamist terrorism and tolerating demonstrators displaying the symbols of a jihadi movement responsible for massacring Jews.
For decades, America has welcomed Muslims as allies, immigrants and citizens, embracing religious freedom and coexistence. At the same time, jihadist movements have declared their own war against the West, seeking religious and political domination. They carried that confrontation beyond the Middle East, taking American hostages, destroying American landmarks and massacring American allies.
The intersections of narrow streets in downtown Manhattan seemingly have compressed history into a web of toxins poisoned by Islamic radicals. Coexistence will only be permissible “under the wing of Islam,” as their “struggle” is perpetual and voracious.
“under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife, oppression spreads, evil prevails and schisms and wars will break out.” – 1988 Hamas foundational charter
The West is in a defensive war against radical Islam. One can see the progression clearly on the streets of lower Broadway.
Summary: Millions of children do not attend school in Somalia; many of those who do are trained in jihad to fight “infidels” by al Shabab. It is a terrifying story of radical Islamic terrorism mapped for generations.
“I was always worried when they were at school,” a Somali mother told Human Rights Watch after her 17-year-old daughter was abducted by Al-Shabaab during a school tea break in Mogadishu. “Every day you get your child back at the end you are thankful.”
For parents in most countries, back to school means teachers, books, friends and homework. In parts of Somalia, it can mean wondering whether the child who left for school in the morning will return in the afternoon – or whether the school itself will become the beginning of a journey into jihad.
Somalia has one of the world’s most severe education crises. UNICEF says more than three million Somali children are out of school, while its more recent educational work puts the out-of-school rate at approximately 65% for primary-age children and 75% at the secondary level. Poverty, displacement, drought, insecurity, distance and a shortage of teachers all contribute to the enormous educational vacuum.
Into that vacuum has stepped Al-Shabaab, an Al-Qaeda affiliate.
The European Union Agency for Asylum estimated that Al-Shabaab controls around 30% of Somalia’s territory, including large rural areas and numerous district capitals, while exercising influence or forms of co-governance well beyond the territory it directly controls. Its leadership remains intact, and the group has continued making territorial gains.
That combination should be terrifying: millions of children disconnected from conventional education alongside a jihadist organization controlling substantial territory and building an education system of its own.
A “Jihadi Worldview”
The Hiraal Institute, a Mogadishu-based security research organization, examined Al-Shabaab’s education system in a report appropriately titled The Fighters Factory. Its description should receive far more attention than it has.
“Children are indoctrinated in the Islamic institutes and made to understand current affairs through a Jihadi worldview. Additionally, the illegitimacy of the Somali government and the obligatory nature of the AS Jihad are ingrained upon them. Quran teaching is done at a faster pace than in traditional schools in order to make time for Jihadi literature. Most children graduate within two years, with many being sent directly to a training camp if they have passed age 15, the Islamic age of maturity.” – Hiraal Institute
The objective is not hidden. Hiraal concluded that Al-Shabaab built the system to create “a steady stream of ideologically pure fighters.”
The U.S. State Department independently documented what that ideology means inside Al-Shabaab-controlled schools: that students should wage war against those the organization considers “infidels,” including people in neighboring countries as well as Somalia’s federal government and international forces.
Consider the progression.
A child does not begin with an assault rifle. He begins with an explanation of the world.
The government is illegitimate. Jihad is obligatory. There are infidels against whom war should be waged. Martyrdom is honorable. The organization providing the lesson possesses religious authority.
This is hatred taught; prejudice as obligation.
Children learning to read the Quran at the Gaabow Islamic school in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, August 2013. (photo: REUTERS/Ismail Taxta)
From Classroom to Training Camp
The distinction between education and recruitment consequently begins to disappear.
Hiraal reported that children educated entirely inside the Al-Shabaab system could become some of its most ideological and fanatical fighters because they had never been exposed to an opposing argument.
American and international reporting describes what can happen next.
The State Department has repeatedly documented Al-Shabaab raiding schools, madrassas and mosques, coercing families and clan elders and recruiting children into its ranks. Children in its camps have undergone physical and religious training alongside weapons training. They have been used to carry ammunition, gather intelligence, plant explosives, fight in combat and serve as human shields and suicide bombers.
The State Department reported that training has even included forcing children to punish and execute other children.
This is not merely recruitment of child soldiers – already a war crime. It is the attempted manufacture of a worldview capable of reproducing violence from one generation to the next.
Young child in al Shabab training camp in Somalia
The Lesson Does Not Stay in Somalia
The categories taught in the classroom can become categories for selecting who lives and who dies. “Infidel” is not merely an ugly word; it is placing a target according to religion to facilitate murder.
That is why the education system deserves to be studied as part of Al-Shabaab’s terrorist infrastructure.
The Jihad Factory
The individual facts have been documented for years. What has been missing is the decision to put them in the same frame.
One institution records children out of school.
Another documents Al-Shabaab’s curriculum.
Another counts child recruitment.
Another records religious persecution.
Terrorism researchers count the dead.
Each is describing a different station along the same potential pathway: educational vacuum, ideological instruction, identification of the infidel, glorification of jihad, weapons training, recruitment and violence.
Al Shabab fighters in Somalia
That is why Al-Shabaab’s schools matter far beyond Somalia’s education statistics. A terrorist killed on a battlefield is one fewer terrorist. A child taught a “Jihadi worldview” represents something altogether different: a wager that the ideology can survive the men currently fighting for it.
Millions of Somali children remain outside school today. Across substantial territory, the organization positioned to exploit that vacuum has already demonstrated what it wants children to learn and, in documented cases, what it has subsequently demanded that children do.
The frightening question is therefore not how many Al-Shabaab fighters can be killed this year. It is how many replacements are sitting in classrooms.
Look at the world’s prominent terrorist organizations in the 1960s and 1970s and something is striking: religion is largely absent.
The PLO and its factions pursued Palestinian nationalism. The IRA fought over Northern Ireland. ETA sought Basque independence. The Red Brigades in Italy, Red Army Faction in Germany and Japanese Red Army embraced revolutionary leftist ideologies.
An analysis by RAND captures what happened next. In 1968, it identified zero religiously motivated international terrorist groups. In 1980, there were two among 64. By 1992 there were 11 among 48. By 1995, 25 of 58—43 percent—were religiously motivated.
Some point to 1979 as the pivotal year, when radical Islam found permanent footholds and inspiration.
In Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic Republic. Political Islam had demonstrated that it could overthrow a western-aligned government.
Iranian revolution of 1979
Iran then exported its revolutionary ideology and supported armed Shiite Islamist movements. Hezbollah, established in Lebanon in the early 1980s, became its most consequential manifestation.
Then came Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union invaded in December 1979. Resistance to a non-Muslim foreign army occupying a Muslim country became an international Islamic cause. Saudi and other Gulf money flowed to the “resistance.” Pakistan became its essential staging ground. The United States supplied extensive assistance as part of its Cold War campaign against Moscow.
Afghanistan became a transnational incubator for Sunni jihad. Militants from different countries met, fought together and developed recruiting, financing and logistical networks. Osama bin Laden joined this world, and al-Qaeda eventually emerged from it.
Fondapol calls the Soviet-Afghan war the “matrix of contemporary Islamist terrorism.”
Other events show 1979 to be a pivotal year.
Islamist militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, denouncing the Saudi monarchy as corrupt and insufficiently Islamic. The episode helped push Saudi Arabia toward greater religious conservatism just as it entered an intensifying competition with revolutionary Iran for leadership and influence across the Muslim world.
Meanwhile, Egypt and Israel made peace. Along with it, secular Arab nationalism, which had dominated much of Middle Eastern politics, began to lose prestige. Islamist movements increasingly presented themselves as the alternative. [Think of Hamas’s 2023 attempt to disrupt the expanding Abraham Accords].
The consequences of radical Islamism entering global terrorism developed gradually and then exploded.
Fondapol records 2,194 Islamist terrorist attacks and 6,817 deaths from 1979 through 2000. From 2001 through 2012, it records 8,265 attacks and more than 38,000 deaths. From 2013 through April 2024, the toll surged to more than 56,000 attacks and roughly 205,000 deaths.
Altogether, its database catalogs 66,872 Islamist terrorist attacks killing nearly 250,000 people between 1979 and April 2024.
And this is not principally a story of Muslims attacking the West. Nearly 89 percent of those deaths occurred in Muslim-majority countries. The Taliban, Islamic State, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda became the five deadliest organizations in the database.
The transformation was both ideological and geographic. Al-Qaeda built affiliates. ISIS built provinces. Boko Haram devastated communities around Lake Chad. Al-Shabaab entrenched itself in Somalia and East Africa. Jihadist organizations spread across the Middle East, South Asia and increasingly Africa.
Iran demonstrated the revolutionary potential of political Islam; Afghanistan created the great transnational Sunni jihadist network; Mecca exposed another radical Islamist current; and the decline of secular Arab nationalism created room for Islamism to expand.
1979 was the year several forces converged and the center of gravity began to shift.
We readily study how nationalism, communism, fascism, white supremacy and other ideologies produced political violence. Jihadism has become the leading driver of terrorism in the world and must have the same intellectual clarity.
Twenty-five years after September 11, the United Nations remembered the 2,977 people murdered in what it called the “heinous terrorist attacks” of September 11, 2001, “an assault on humanity itself.” It declared that “the fight against terrorism is a shared, unfinished task.”
But something rather important was missing.
Who were the terrorists? What did they believe? Why did they do it?
There was no al-Qaeda. No Osama bin Laden. No Islamist extremism. No jihadism. Nothing about an ideology whose most famous declaration called for jihad against “Jews and Crusaders.”
Perhaps the United Nations simply avoids attaching ideologies to terrorism. It does not.
After a white supremacist murdered 49 Muslims at two Christchurch mosques in 2019, the UN spoke explicitly about “anti-Muslim hatred,” “anti-Islamic sentiments” and Islamophobia. Secretary-General António Guterres described the Pittsburgh Tree of Life massacre as the “worst antisemitic attack in the history of the United States.” Discussing the Halle synagogue attack and related violence, the UN warned about “antisemitic hatred,” “Neo-Nazis and white supremacists” and their “poisonous ideology.”
That is exactly what an institution confronting extremism should do. Terrorism is an act; ideology can explain its motivation.
Then consider Sri Lanka.
On Easter Sunday 2019, radical Islamist suicide bombers attacked churches and hotels, killing roughly 270 people. Sri Lanka subsequently told the UN that the terrorists had been “inspired and indoctrinated” by extremist organizations including ISIL/Daesh and had “specifically targeted churches.”
Yet on the seventh anniversary in 2026, the UN remembered the victims of the “Easter Sunday attacks.” Not terrorist attacks. Not ISIS-inspired terrorism. Not jihadism or Islamist extremism. Not anti-Christian hatred. The killers’ ideology had vanished.
That makes the 9/11 omission considerably harder to dismiss as an unfortunate choice of words. When Muslims are murdered by an anti-Muslim extremist, the ideology matters. When Jews are murdered by antisemites or neo-Nazis, the ideology matters. But when jihadists murder Americans or ISIS-inspired suicide bombers slaughter Christians at Easter, the UN retreats into the bloodless vocabulary of “terrorism” and “attacks.”
The problem is not that the UN says Islamophobia, antisemitism, white supremacy or neo-Nazism. The problem is its apparent inability to apply the same principle to jihadism.
That is no longer merely a question of consistency.
A 2024 study by the French think tank Fondapol catalogued 66,872 Islamist terrorist attacks since 1979, killing nearly 250,000 people. Roughly 243,000 of those deaths occurred after 2001. Almost 89 percent of the dead were killed in Muslim-majority countries. The Taliban, Islamic State, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda accounted for more than four-fifths of the victims.
“Islamist attacks around the world are more numerous today than ever before.” – Fondapol study
Jihadist ideology is therefore hardly an extinct doctrine being dredged up to explain a 25-year-old atrocity. Al-Qaeda survives. ISIS and its affiliates survive. Jihadist organizations continue to recruit and kill around the world, with Muslims overwhelmingly among their victims.
Calling that ideology jihadist or Islamist extremism no more condemns Muslims generally than calling an ideology neo-Nazi condemns Germans. In fact, refusing to make that distinction does Muslims no favor. It obscures an extremist ideology that has slaughtered enormous numbers of Muslims themselves.
Nor are the extremists coy about what they believe. They publish it, preach it, recruit with it and murder in its name. It is the international institutions confronting them that increasingly seem afraid to repeat what the killers themselves say.
So the UN should answer a straightforward question: Why can it say “white supremacist” and “neo-Nazi,” but not “jihadist”?
Has fear of accusations of Islamophobia—or pressure from states and organizations determined to shield Islamist ideology from scrutiny—become so powerful that jihadist supremacy alone receives a linguistic sanctuary at the United Nations?
Whatever the explanation, the consequence is dangerous. An ideology does not become less lethal because international institutions refuse to name it. It simply becomes harder to confront.
When terrorists can proclaim their ideology more plainly than the United Nations can describe it, sensitivity has crossed the line into surrender.
On September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airplanes and murdered nearly 3,000 people. They were followers of Osama bin Laden, who had declared jihad against the United States and explicitly invoked religion, Jews and “Crusaders” in explaining the war he believed he was fighting.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has a guide for teaching September 11 to American children in grades 6 through 12. Its approach to that history is remarkable: don’t call the people who committed 9/11 “jihadists,” but make sure students learn extensively about Muslims as victims after 9/11.
CAIR’s Remembering and Reflecting on Sep. 11, 2001 in the Classroom tells educators to avoid language that “associates” the mass murder with Islam and Muslims. It specifically identifies three terms it considers “inaccurate and inflammatory”: “Islamic terrorists,” “jihadists” and “radical Islamic terrorists.”
“Avoid using language that validates the claims of the 9/11 attackers by associating their acts of mass murder with Islam and Muslims. For example, avoid using inaccurate and inflammatory terms such as “Islamic terrorists,” “jihadists,” or “radical Islamic terrorists.”” – CAIR teaching guide
The objection to “jihadists” is particularly revealing. The word does not describe Muslims generally. Quite the opposite: it distinguishes a radical movement from the enormous population of Muslims who do not subscribe to it. Likewise, adding “radical” to Islamic terrorism is an explicit qualifier. A teacher can explain precisely what al-Qaeda believed while simultaneously making clear that its ideology was rejected by countless Muslims.
CAIR instead recommends removing the distinction.
That might seem like a dispute over terminology until one reaches the guide’s recommended reading list. Then the editorial direction becomes unmistakable.
Among the eleven articles CAIR recommends are “Commemorate 9/11 by Confronting Islamophobia,” “9/11 at 10: Lessons Learned From Anti-Muslim Haters,” “Muslims in America, post 9/11,” “Hope and Despair: Being Muslim in America After 9/11,” “How Being Muslim In America Has Changed Since 9/11,” “Remembering the Muslims who were killed in the 9/11 attacks,” and “How 9/11 Caused An Increase In Islamophobic Hate Crimes.”
Seven of the eleven titles are explicitly centered on Muslims, Islamophobia or anti-Muslim discrimination. Another recommended reading concerns federal civil-rights engagement with Arab and Muslim communities.
The videos follow much the same path. Students are offered “How 9/11 Shaped the Lives of American Muslims,” “Minorities targeted in 9/11 ‘revenge attacks,’” “9/11 Changed Life For American Muslims,” and “Post 9/11 Detention Of American Muslims.”
What is conspicuously absent from CAIR’s article list is a comparable body of material about why September 11 happened in the first place and who conducted the heinous acts of mass murder.
There is no recommended article devoted to al-Qaeda’s ideology. None to the development of jihadism. None examining bin Laden’s religious declarations. None exploring why al-Qaeda spoke of Jews and “Crusaders,” or why its followers believed their mass murder of civilians was justified as jihad.
Instead, CAIR explicitly tells teachers what they should add: Muslim condemnations of the attacks, solidarity from Muslim-majority countries, Muslim leaders joining President George W. Bush at a mosque and Muhammad Ali participating in a fundraiser. When discussing the aftermath, teachers are instructed to include hate crimes and bigotry against Muslims, Sikhs, Arabs and other minorities.
Those are legitimate subjects. Americans who attacked innocent Muslims, Sikhs or Arabs after September 11 committed reprehensible crimes. Muslim Americans who died in the World Trade Center deserve to be remembered alongside every other innocent victim.
But that is precisely why the imbalance matters.
A history lesson should be capable of holding two ideas simultaneously: radical Islamists murdered nearly 3,000 innocent people on September 11, and innocent Muslims subsequently became targets of bigotry by people who wrongly held them responsible.
In fact, accurately naming the first proposition makes the second easier to understand. “Jihadist” separates the extremists from Muslims generally. “Radical Islamist” identifies an ideology rather than an ethnicity or an entire faith. Students can then examine that ideology, understand why most Muslims reject it and understand why blaming ordinary Muslims for al-Qaeda’s crimes is both factually wrong and morally indefensible.
CAIR takes the opposite route.
Religion becomes something educators should carefully detach from the perpetrators, even though the perpetrators themselves repeatedly invoked it. Then religious identity becomes central when discussing the victims of the aftermath.
The inversion is extraordinary.
Consider what a student following CAIR’s bibliography is encouraged to encounter. The student can read about anti-Muslim haters, Islamophobic hate crimes, Muslim life after 9/11, Muslim heroes, Muslim victims, Muslim detention and civil rights for Muslim communities.
But where is the corresponding invitation to study the jihadists?
Where is bin Laden’s worldview? Where is al-Qaeda’s theology? Where are its declarations? Where is its obsession with “Crusaders” and Jews? Where is the intellectual history that transformed religious extremism into airplanes crashing into buildings filled with civilians?
September 11 did not begin with Islamophobia. It began with an ideology and 19 men prepared to murder thousands of strangers in the name of radical Islam.
CAIR is not asking schools merely to protect Muslim students from collective blame. It is asking educators to perform something far more consequential: strip the perpetrators of the language that identifies their radical ideology while repeatedly directing students toward the victimization of Muslims that followed their attack.
That is not historical sensitivity. It is historical inversion.
And it invites conspiracy theories that Jews committed 9/11, when the slaughter was done in the name of genocidal jihad.
Graffiti in London in 2019 claiming that Jews did 9/11, or that another mass murder is coming for Jews
CAIR’s approach leaves students with a grotesquely rearranged history: the Muslims who suffered bigotry after 9/11 retain their religious identity, while the jihadists who caused 9/11 are stripped of theirs.
CAIR calls that responsible teaching. A better description is laundering the ideology of the killers out of the history of their crime.
