Jihad in the sense of territorial expansion has always been a central aspect of Muslim life. That's how Muslims came to rule much of the Arabian Peninsula by the time of the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632. It's how, a century later, Muslims had conquered a region from Afghanistan to Spain. Subsequently, jihad spurred and justified Muslim conquests of such territories as India, Sudan, Anatolia, and the Balkans.

Today, jihad is the world's foremost source of terrorism, inspiring a worldwide campaign of violence by self-proclaimed jihadist groups...

Here's what Martin Kramer, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, has to say about Jihad:

Listening to the academics, jihad began to sound like a traditional self-help technique--perhaps an Islamic version of controlled breathing.

Consider, for example, a New York Times op-ed written by Roy Mottahedeh, the Gurney Professor of History and chairman of the Committee on Islamic Studies at Harvard. Mottahedeh began by citing Muslim clerics who had condemned September 11 as a violation of Islamic law. Indeed, some did condemn it. But then he made a leap. "Some politicians and imperfectly educated Muslim clerics have used the word jihad loosely in the sense of armed struggle," he complained. But "this meaning is rejected by most modern Muslim scholars, who say it properly refers to the struggle against the distortion of Islam." According to Mottahedeh, "a majority of learned Muslim thinkers, drawing on impeccable scholarship, insist that jihad must be understood as a struggle without arms."9

Jihad--unarmed struggle? How so? Barbara Stowasser, professor of Arabic at Georgetown University, elaborated at a forum held on her campus in October. "Jihad," she stated, "is a serious personal commitment to the faith," a struggle against "evil intentions," and a "working toward the moral betterment of society." Only at the very end of the Qur'an is it used to denote armed struggle, and even then, she added, Muslims are enjoined only to engage in defensive war. In Stowasser's view, al-Qa'ida "goes against the majority of Islam and against most of Islamic legal theory." They were a group that "picks and chooses in its approach to the Qur'an."10

Well, of course they do, but so do the American scholars who have picked and chosen their way through the Qur'an and Islamic legal theory, in a deliberate effort to demilitarize both, or even to turn Islam into a pacifist faith--a kind of oriental Quakerism. This interpretation is as tendentious as al-Qa'ida's. Emile Tyan, author of the article on jihad in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, described this approach as "wholly apologetic." "Jihad consists of military action with the object of the expansion of Islam," he determined; presenting it as peaceful persuasion or self-defense "disregard[s] entirely the previous doctrine and historical tradition, as well as the texts of the Qur'an and the Sunna."11 In fact, someone has to be "imperfectly educated" to argue that jihad must be understood as struggle without arms. As Rudolph Peters wrote in his book on the doctrine of jihad, it is the idea of pacifist or defensive jihad that is new; Islamists (like bin Ladin) are much closer to classical doctrine.12 And that doctrine has enjoyed an obvious revival over the past twenty years.

Robert Spencer in his "Jihad: The Real Terrorist Enemy" says of Jihad:

.. .For this is in fact the war we're in: a war against people who identify themselves as jihadis, not as terrorists. The evildoers themselves, and their sympathizers, have on many occasions disdained the term "terrorism" for the same reasons Whitbeck does. But they aren't left as bereft of understanding as he seems to be; as the Saudi Sheikh Wajdi Hamza Al-Ghazawi put it in a sermon: "The meaning of the term 'terror' used by the media . . . is Jihad for the sake of Allah." Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakar Bashir in Indonesia, Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza in England, Mullah Krekar in Norway, and other radical Muslims around the world have been unanimous in declaring that they are not indiscriminate purveyors of mayhem -- terrorists -- but mujahedin: jihad warriors. They have declared again and again that they are fighting to unify the Islamic people under a restored caliphate, and to establish the hegemony of Islamic law over the reunified umma, as well as over the non-Muslim world. In doing this, they say, they are acting in complete accord with the commandments of their religion, which mandates warfare against non-Muslims in order to establish Islamic rule. And they have declared that in this struggle, the United States is their principal foe.

Why not take them at their word? Why not acknowledge that the war on terror is a defensive action against global jihadists?

The obvious answer, of course, is that to do so would alienate moderate Muslim regimes, as well as the Muslim population in the United States. But there is no reason why this must necessarily be so. If Western Muslims are genuine moderates, who truly regard jihad solely as the prevailing rhetoric has it -- as a spiritual struggle -- then they should have no trouble with a conflict against these men who have "hijacked" their religion.

We could go on indefinately, but what's the use. The EU hasn't understood that Islamists wish us great harm, along with the destruction of Western society. They haven't "gotten it" so far, and they still don't "get it". They probably won't until it's too late, if it isn't already!