When I wrote I’m Offended, You’re Dead in 2015, I argued that the West fundamentally misunderstood violent jihadism. It was routinely described as the work of a tiny fringe because Western observers were looking almost exclusively at Europe and North America. But that was never where most Muslims lived or where most of the violence occured.
The view that a few “extremists” have hijacked Islam and are attacking the freedom of press is both myopic in terms of history and geography, and hazy in terms of numbers and scope.
In the Global North, Muslims make up only about 2.6% of the population. Across the Global South, they account for roughly 28%. Excluding Latin America and China, that figure rises to about 42%. The attitudes that gave rise to violent jihadism were therefore never confined to a handful of isolated extremists. Across large parts of the Muslim world, Islamist movements and deeply illiberal religious doctrines already exercised enormous influence and persecute people attempting to live with basic human rights. The West mistook a geographic illusion for an ideological one.
Terrorist movements do not emerge in an ideological vacuum. An ideology does not need majority support to convince a determined minority that violence is both righteous and necessary.
And you no longer have to listen carefully to hear that message.
Over the past decade, migration, social media, and global communications have brought that ideological current into the daily background of Western life. Many will be alarmed and others will feel called. Either way, it has become ever-present and one no longer needs to search to find it.
The attacks increasingly follow a familiar pattern because they spring from the same worldview.
The gay patrons of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando were condemned as morally corrupt and massacred by a man with ties to al Qaeda and Hezbollah. This week, a Berlin Pride parade became the target of a man who had reportedly sought to join ISIS. Christmas markets in Germany have repeatedly been attacked by men invoking Islamist causes. Trucks and cars have been used as weapons against civilians in France, Germany, and Israel. In Manhattan, a deranged man allegedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” while carrying out a stabbing spree.
Different countries. Different perpetrators. Different personal histories.
Yet the underlying message is strikingly similar: for the jihadists, those who offend do not merely deserve criticism – they deserve elimination.
That is the lesson many in the West still refuse to absorb. We continue to interpret these attacks through the lens of isolated extremism, mental illness, or individual grievance. Those factors may help explain why one person acts and another does not. They do not explain why the same religious slogans, the same enemies – the West, and the same methods appear again and again across continents.
The lesson of I’m Offended, You’re Dead is even more relevant today than it was a decade ago. The argument was never that every Muslim is a jihadist. It was that an ideology can become pervasive enough to inspire violence far beyond the ranks of organized terrorist groups. Even beyond “lone wolves.” It becomes the default language of the street.
The West believes it is engaged in an argument over speech and tolerance. About the quantitative size of immigration and the culture of new arrivals. Because that is the culture of the West – to debate, to find compromise, to coexist.
But violent jihadism is engaged in something else entirely. It is not trying to persuade those it finds offensive. It seeks to destroy them.
A decade ago, you had to look for that message, to parse that difference. Today, you don’t.
The call of “Allahu Akbar” is no longer confined to jihadi groups or even “lone wolf” radicals as they commit attacks. Because the anti-West lexicon has become normalized on the angry streets, hunting people perceived of as “monsters.”
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