Shedding false explanations of jihadism, one at a time

In addition to using silly euphemisms to refer to Islam, Western intellectuals, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, insist on fitting Islamic jihadism into some comforting, familiar conceptual package of their own (e.g., as a response to alienation, or powerlessness, or poverty, or prejudice), rather than understanding Islam as it is in itself. Rod Dreher at the Dallas Morning News provides a nice gloss to my efforts in this area. We can’t afford to recognize the jihadists as they really are, he says, because that would force us to deal with them in non-liberal ways.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 11, 2006 08:00 AM | Send