Tag Archives: radical Islam

Back to School in Somalia: The Jihadi Classroom

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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.

“I was with al-Shabaab for three months in 2010…. They wanted to train us to fight and I was afraid. I didn’t want to kill people. I wanted to go back to school and learn.” – Amare A. (not his real name), 10-year-old boy from Mogadishu, living in Kenya, June 2, 2011

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.

1979: The Year Terrorism Changed and Jihadism Became Impossible To Ignore

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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.

The UN’s Jihadi Exception

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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.

Related:

Pick Your Jihad; Choose Your Infidel (September 2014)

CAIR’s 9/11 Curriculum: Erase the Jihadists, Center Muslims as Victims

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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.

Related:

Your Neighbors Are Celebrating December 7, 9/11, and October 7 (December 2024)

On 9/11, Commit To Blocking Iran and Saudi Arabia From Ever Possessing Weapons Of Mass Destruction (September 2022)

Trends in Anti-Muslim and Anti-Semitic Attacks Post-9/11 (September 2021)

You No Longer Have to Listen Closely

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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.

Moses Grunhaus after he was stabbed by a man yelling “Allahu Akbar.” He was in New York City to clear out his apartment to move to Florida because of the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani

Different countries. Different perpetrators. Different personal histories.

Official Palestinian media produced cartoons calling for Arabs to run over Jews

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.

Islamic radicals riot in Paris, France

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.”

Jihadi-washing and the Ideology the Times Won’t Name

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A bombing attempt near Gracie Mansion followed a pattern Americans have seen before: young men radicalized online, pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and attempting violence in the name of jihad.

But if you read the The New York Times, you might never notice the pattern at all.

Two men were charged after attempting the ISIS-inspired bombing near Gracie Mansion. Prosecutors say the suspects pledged allegiance to ISIS and threw improvised explosive devices toward a protest crowd and police. The bombs failed to detonate, but the casualties could have been catastrophic. The bombing suspects were 18-year-old Emir Balat, a high school student, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19.

The plot followed a model ISIS has promoted for years: radicalize individuals already living in Western societies and encourage them to strike where they live. No training camps. No command structure. Just ideology delivered through propaganda, social media and Muslim countries money in American schools.

America has already seen the results.

In 2015, a radicalized couple carried out the San Bernardino attack. Syed Rizwan Farook was 28 and Tashfeen Malik was 29.

In 2016, Omar Mateen, 29, murdered forty nine people in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando while declaring loyalty to ISIS.

In 2017, Sayfullo Saipov, also 29, drove a rented truck onto the Hudson River bike path in Manhattan in the 2017 New York City truck attack, killing eight people and leaving a note pledging allegiance to ISIS.

This pattern is not accidental. ISIS propaganda deliberately targets young Muslims in their late teens and twenties, the age when identity and grievance can be shaped by ideology. The strategy is not to import terrorists into the West. It is to cultivate them here.

Yet when the New York Times recently referenced the Hudson River attack, it described it simply as “a terrorist driving a truck killed eight people.”

The ideology behind the attack vanished from the story.

When the ideology behind violence disappears, the violence itself begins to look random. But it is not random. It is ideological.

The same pattern of New York Times’ language appears elsewhere.

After the October 7 massacre carried out by Hamas, the New York Times described social media posts celebrating the attack as being “supportive of the Palestinian cause.” One of the examples involved Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had liked posts praising the attack shortly after it occurred. At the time, Duwaji was 26 years old.

October 7 was a terrorist assault in which more than a thousand Israelis were murdered and civilians were kidnapped. Describing celebration of that massacre as support for a “cause” transforms the event itself, and radical jihadi terrorism disappears.

ISIS and Hamas operate in different places and pursue different strategies, but they draw from the same radical Islamist narrative that frames Jews as enemies and violence as religious duty.

Online, that narrative increasingly reaches the same audience: young people in Western societies, including young Muslims searching for identity and purpose.

In New York the consequences are already visible. According to the New York City Police Department, Jews consistently account for the largest share of hate crime victims in the city, far out of proportion to their share of the population.

We now face two related problems.

First, there is an ideology problem. Radical Islamist movements openly encourage violence against Western societies and portray Jews as enemies in a religious struggle.

Second, there is a sanitization problem. When that ideology is softened, blurred, or renamed as a “cause,” the public cannot see the pattern.

San Bernardino.
Orlando.
The Hudson River bike path.
Bombing attempt near Gracie Mansion.
Young people celebrating Muslim massacres of Jews.

A sick 60% of Americans aged 18-24 polled said the October 7 massacre was “justified,” 50% support Hamas, and 51% said Israel should end and be handed to Hamas

Different attacks with the same ideological current reaching the same young audience, and pointing toward the same enemies.

The violence makes headlines yet the ideology poisoning western youth is being whitewashed. That is jihadi-washing, and it endangers us all.

The Ghosts of Jihadi Christmas

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Before Christmas arrives in Europe, the barricades do.

Markets are designed around security corridors. Choirs rehearse behind concrete blocks. Armed patrols take their positions weeks in advance. In some cities, officials quietly shrink routes, replace gatherings with broadcasts, or advise citizens to celebrate privately. These decisions are made before a single hymn is sung, before a single candle is lit.

The season now begins with anticipation—not of joy, but of danger.

Europe carries this fear because Christmas has already been marked in blood. In Berlin in 2016, families shopping for ornaments were crushed beneath a truck driven by a man who pledged allegiance to ISIS. In Strasbourg in 2018, a gunman stalked a Christmas market, shouting Islamic slogans as he killed. An attack was foiled the following year in Vienna, Austria. Just days ago, five Muslim men were arrested for planning a Christmas attack in Germany. Another attack in Poland was foiled.

13 people killed in Berlin Christmas attack in 2016

These attacks were not misdirected rage or incidental violence. Christmas itself was the target. Its visibility, its symbolism, its unapologetic presence in public space made it irresistible to jihadist ideology.

Time has passed, but the lesson lingers. Terror no longer needs to strike every year to be effective. Memory enforces compliance. The terrifying ghosts return on schedule, and cities respond accordingly.

The ideology behind this fear is explicit. Radical Islamism divides the world into rulers and the ruled, believers and infidels. Christians and Jews are permitted only when diminished, tolerated only when silent. Public faith is defiance. Celebration is rebellion. Holidays are moments when submission is tested.

People mourn five people killed by jihadist in Strasbourg, France in 2018

That worldview does not stop at Europe’s borders.

In Nigeria, Christmas approaches without illusions. In the northeast, churches shorten services or cancel them outright. Caroling routes remain undrawn. Families calculate risk before prayer. Islamist insurgents have repeatedly attacked Christian villages and churches on Christmas and Easter, murdering worshippers and burning sanctuaries. The timing is intentional. The theology is clear. Christmas is treated as an offense that must be punished.
Here, fear is not inherited memory. It is lived experience.

Radical Islamists kill 295 Christians in Nigeria on Christmas 2023, mostly women and children, burned alive

Jews have been bearing this burden for decades, their calendar similarly weaponized against them. Jewish holidays are chosen for attack because they gather families, because they proclaim continuity, because they announce survival in the open.

On Simchat Torah in Israel in 2023, 1,200 Jews celebrating the renewal of the Torah were slaughtered in their homes and at festivals. The date was chosen carefully. In Sydney, Australia, Jews gathering during Chanukah were met with terror and violence. A holiday of light confronted an ideology that demands darkness, enforced not metaphorically but operationally.

Across continents and faiths, the pattern holds. Jihadist terror does not only murder people. It seeks to reorder time. It teaches Christians and Jews that their holidays are liabilities, that joy invites punishment, that visibility must be negotiated. It aims to train infidels to bend the knee before violence is even required.

This is why the danger is most acute before Christmas, before Chanukah, before any non-Islamic holy day arrives. When celebrations are diminished in advance, when silence is praised as responsibility, when absence is framed as wisdom, terror has already achieved governance. Fear begins to regulate behavior.

A society that learns to cancel joy preemptively will eventually learn to cancel belief, then speech, then presence itself. When communities retreat before threats are issued, coercion has become ambient. Submission has become routine.

For the past decade, Islamic radicals have been chanting in Arabic in the West, “Khaybar, Khaybar Ya Yahud, Jaish Mohammed Sauf Ya’ud” which means “Watch Out Jews, Remember Khaybar, the Army of Mohammed is returning”. That Army of Mohammed is the ghost of jihadi Christmas coming to slaughter infidels near you.

For The Love Of Jihad

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“God is love,” says the Christian scripture (1 John 4:8). In Judaism, Ahavat Hashem — love of God — is commanded and cultivated with blessing: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). The love of God is a bond between man and heaven built on compassion, holiness, and peace.

But in far too many places across the Global South, another phrase is being taught: “The love of Jihad.”

It’s neither metaphorical nor poetic. It is proudly literal — sung by schoolchildren, broadcast on TV, etched into educational curricula, printed on flags held by terrorists. “We love death like our enemies love life” was a chilling Hamas slogan even before October 7, 2023. It isn’t a chant of a lone errant radical but a core tenet of Islamist extremism: to define one’s identity by war, death, and the annihilation of the other.

Two Loves. Two Worlds.

There is a love that sanctifies hospitals, schools, and synagogues. There is another love that sanctifies suicide belts and the murderers of civilians.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, love flows downward from a Creator who gives life and asks for holiness in return. Morality is measured by how one treats the stranger, the widow, the orphan. The spiritual path is about elevating the self — resisting the urge to dominate, to hate, to take vengeance. I call it “Humble Faith.”

But in radical Islamist ideology, compassion is redirected from the divine to the destructive. Martyrdom is romanticized. The afterlife is promised not to those who love their neighbor, but to those who murder them. Jihad isn’t just war — it’s the highest expression of spiritual devotion.

Columbia University students call “Glory to the martyrs. Victory to the Resistance” supporting the Hamas war in October 2024 (photo: Mike Segar, Reuters, Redux)

People have attempted to sanitize “jihad” and “intifada” in Western media. We are told jihad means “inner struggle” and intifada means “shake off.” Perhaps it does for some Muslims. But the jihad of Hamas, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards is unmistakably violent. It’s the jihad of Kalashnikovs, tunnels under kindergartens, and paragliders into music festivals. It’s identical to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” which similarly means “My Struggle.”

"Jihad means the fighting of the unbelievers and involves all possible efforts that are necessary to dismantle the power of the enemies of Islam, including beating them, plundering their wealth, destroying their places of worship, and smashing their idols."
- Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood

And yet, around the world, there is a growing refusal to admit this unvarnished truth.

The West’s Romanticization of Jihad

Academics and activists in the West have twisted themselves into knots to justify the “rage” of jihadists. Excuses of “occupation,” “imperialism” and “colonialism” are concocted. New definition of “apartheid” and “genocide” are contrived. The love of jihad is recast as a legitimate cry for justice, while Israel’s efforts to protect its citizens is painted as cruel, racist, even genocidal.

When Hamas terrorists butchered entire Israeli families, raped women, and burned children alive, some depraved people in the West saw “resistance.” When Israel responded, the cries of “Ceasefire now!” emerged to protect Hamas, but not for Israel, which had been dragged into battle.

Hamas terrorist Ahlam Tamimi, who abetted the killing of 15 people and injuring of 122 – almost all women and children, celebrated her jihadi murders. She walks free in Jordan.

A World Turned Upside Down

Imagine a child in Gaza, raised on songs about martyrdom and vengeance, told that killing Jews is a way to please Allah. Compare him to a Jewish child reciting “Oseh shalom bimromav” — “May He who makes peace in His heavens bring peace upon us.”

Imagine a Christian child learning to “turn the other cheek,” and then hearing protesters on Western campuses chant “Intifada until victory” — a call for permanent war.

There are two radically different spiritual trajectories here. One aims upward, toward love, life, and sanctity. The other plunges downward into hatred, death, and hell.

It is no coincidence that the Islamic Republic of Iran calls Israel “Little Satan” and the United States “Big Satan.” The philosophy of radical Islamism is not oriented towards love and God but directed to violence and the underworld.

Choose Your Love

The West must stop pretending. To love God is to abhor the love of jihad. To defend life is not to disrespect culture; it is to preserve culture that can sustain a free and peaceful society.

Jihadism — like Nazism before it — dresses hatred in the garb of purpose. It seduces the young, exploits the poor, and destroys the innocent. And like Nazism, it will not stop until it is confronted with clarity, courage, and conviction.

We must stop asking why terrorists hate and start asking why we excuse it.

Sen. Ted Cruz talking about radical Islamic jihad in 2015, because then President Barack Obama refused to utter the words

The love of God builds nations. The love of jihad destroys them.

So it happened. So it happens again in our time.

Related:

The UN Has Joined The Jihadi Fray (February 2024)

When Founding Fathers Are Psychopaths And Cowards (January 2024)

Jihadi Coexistence (October 2023)

Mother’s Day And Ahlam Al-Tamimi (May 2022)

The Insidious Jihad in America (July 2019)

Considering Nazis and Radical Islam on the 75th Anniversary of D-Day (June 2019)

I’m Offended, You’re Dead (February 2015)

Why the Media Ignores Jihadists in Israel (January 2015)

Hamas’ War Is A Radical Religious Jihadi War Of Annihilation

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Many political experts have offered that there is no way to defeat Hamas’ ideology though military means. Israel’s war effort will only be successful in defeating the military capabilities of the political-terrorist group, much like allied forces defeated Nazi Germany in World War II, and US and other allies defeated al-Qaeda and ISIS in the 21st century. The ultimate driver of Hamas, to destroy the Jewish State, will continue to fuel another generation of Palestinian radicals.

What goes unmentioned is that this “ideology” is rooted in religious fanaticism, much like al Qaeda and ISIS, among others. This potentially makes the ideology eternal, so any notion of defeating the ideology would be nonsensical.

Consider that there are only 900 Christian Arabs in Gaza out of a population of roughly 2.2 million, a paltry 0.04% of the region, with the rest being Muslim. The strip is deeply religious under a strictly Islamic religious regime enforcing sharia law. Hamas is attempting to use its Gaza foothold as the launching pad for a caliphate with the help of other Islamic regimes including Iran and Qatar, to consume Israel next door.

The radical Islamic nature of Gazans has always driven a zeal to kill Jewish civilians inside of Israel. It is why Hamas termed the October 7 massacre the ‘Al Aqsa Flood,’ to tie the butchering of Jews with redeeming the Islamic mosque in Jerusalem. It is why defenders of Hamas react wildly when people discuss the multiple rapes and sexual abuse committed by the Islamic terrorists, as it defames them religiously.

The media attempts to portray the war as a territorial dispute and deliberately omits the religious nature of the jihadists’ demand to destroy the Jewish State. The United Nations Secretary General further inverts the nature of the war and claims that Israel is engaged in a war of “Islamophobia.”

Last week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas came clean about his fanatical Islamic and antisemitic and anti-US beliefs in front of the Turkish parliament as he declared “we implement sharia law: victory or martyrdom!” and “America is the plague and the plague is America.”

The Israel-Arab war is a religious war for Palestinian Arabs and the Islamic Republic of Iran, not a territorial war. It is therefore not surprising that Jews in the diaspora are being attacked by antisemites who berate Jews as murderers, racists and robbers who are “colonizers,” not indigenous to the land of Israel. It is an unhinged rant of fanatics who celebrate the slaughter of unbelievers unmoored in reality, not a reasoned opinion capable of being addressed.

Related articles:

‘The Day After’ Is Moving From a Military Solution To A Religious One, Not a Political One (March 2024)

The Rape And Torture Of Jewish Women By Emasculated Palestinian Men (January 2024)

Hamas Is The Very Definition Of A Genocidal Group (November 2023)

Palestinian Authority Tries To Fan Flame Of Global Intifada While War Rages In Gaza (October 2023)

The Terrorism Of Emasculated Palestinians (June 2023)

Anti-Semitism Spikes Because Israel-Palestine is a Religious Battle (June 2021)

Excerpt of Hamas Charter to Share with Your Elected Officials (May 2021)

The War Against Israel and Jewish Civilians (December 2019)

Jerusalem’s Old City Is a Religious War for Muslim Arabs (March 2019)

Why the Media Ignores Jihadists in Israel (January 2015)

The UN Reminds The World That Palestinian Terrorists And Enablers Are To Be Excused

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The scourge of terrorism is still very much present around the world, especially in areas of concentration of Islamist militants.

In Pakistan, rivals have been blowing up crowds at rallies and in mosques. On July 30, at least 63 people were killed and over 130 injured when a suicide bomber set off explosives at a political rally in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province at a gathering of the conservative Jamiat Ulema Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) party, known for its links to hardline political Islam, in the former tribal area of Bajaur, which borders Afghanistan. ISIS claimed responsibility. Reuters added that “Pakistan has seen a resurgence of attacks by Islamist militants since last year when a ceasefire between the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) [also known as the Pakistani Taliban] and Islamabad broke down. A mosque bombing in Peshawar killed over 100 people earlier this year.”

Relatives and mourners gather around the caskets of victims who were killed in Sunday’s suicide bomber attack in the Bajur district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, Monday, July 31, 2023. (photo: Mohammad Sajjad/AP)

The United Nations Security Council quickly condemned the “heinous and cowardly suicide terrorist attack” and “expressed their deepest sympathy and condolences to the families of the victims and to the Government of Pakistan, and they wished a speedy and full recovery to those who were injured.” It continued:

“The members of the Security Council reaffirmed that terrorism in all its forms and manifestations constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security.

“The members of the Security Council underlined the need to hold perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors of these reprehensible acts of terrorism accountable and bring them to justice.  They urged all States, in accordance with their obligations under international law and relevant Security Council resolutions, to cooperate actively with the Government of Pakistan, as well as all other relevant authorities in this regard.

“The members of the Security Council reiterated that any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and by whomsoever committed.  They reaffirmed the need for all States to combat by all means, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and other obligations under international law, including international human rights law, international refugee law and international humanitarian law, threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts.”

These three paragraphs sound weighty but are pre-packaged, off-the-shelf statements used repeatedly. The UNSC used it in January 2023 in Pakistan and aired the same in December 2022, September 2022 and March 2018 in Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria, respectively.

But not for Israel. When Israel is confronted with Islamist militants slaughtering innocent civilians, the UNSC cannot recall how to “copy-paste.”

In January 2023, the UNSC condemned the slaughter of seven Jews at a synagogue during a session discussing the region but issued no canned statement. The UN Secretary General issued a terse statement which did not suggest that Israel “hold perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors… to justice.” Instead, he expressed the opposite desire because he “is deeply worried about the current escalation of violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory. This is the moment to exercise utmost restraint.“

This is an old, despicable story, in which the UN urges the world to fight terrorism while demanding Israel accept terrorism as a penance for existing.

Related articles:

The United Nations’ Remorse for “Creating” Israel

United Nations’ Particularism About Racism But Universalism On Anti-Semitism Reveals Its Jew Hatred

The United States Should NOT be a Neutral Mediator in the Arab-Israel Conflict

UNRWA’s Ongoing War against Israel and Jews

Amid The Terror, The United Nations Once Again Protects Palestinians

First the Attackers Were Radical Islamic Extremists

France’s Hypocrisy Expelling Radical Extremist Non-Citizens