A jihad by any other name....

Submitted by Jinan Safwat (United States), Aug 15, 2006 at 01:08

The unsolvable problem here is that we're trying to describe an Islamic issue in Western terms? It's like a sports commentator trying to report a soccer match using baseball terminology. It will never work.

We've now been in this struggle long enough that the public is sufficiently aware of the most basic Islamic terminology. Why not simply refer to the enemy using their own terminology? Call them what they are -- violent jihadists. This would define them in a rather objective and thus unobjectionable way. In addition, it would also help everyone to further refine their definitions. For instance, al Qaeda, the Iranians and Hizbullah are all pursuing violent jihad, but al Qaeda prefers suicide attacks, whereas (currently, at least) Iran and Hizbullah do not, preferring instead to use their own civilian populations as shields to pursue the indiscriminate killing of infidel civilians through the launching of rockets and missiles and the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, advocacy organizations like CAIR are apologists for violent jihad, while retaining (or at least certainly not renouncing) a belief in non-violent jihad. This, in turn, would also force people to start addressing the outcomes sought by even non-violent jihadists, such as imposition of sharia, subversion of the Constitution, dhimmitude, etc. Finally and perhaps most importantly, the use of such terminology might even help Muslims focus on the problem within their own tradition and perhaps (inshallah) reform it.

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