[why the Question mark? See below, after letter]
Will Robert Wright now issue a corrigendum, or better yet, a mea culpa, for his piece on 29th June (“The myth of modern jihad”) in which he took the Times Square would-be bomber’s guilty plea as evidence that it’s grievance that drives Islamist terrorism and thus “the holy war could end if America could stop using military force”. In the course of this “analysis”, Wright heaped scorn on those like Daniel Pipes who see the view the Islamist threat in more existential terms: Islamists that are out to get the west, because we are “infidels”, who don’t follow the “one true path” and worship only Allah.
Faisal Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber, has now delivered himself of rather more detail on his view of the world: and it turns out it’s rather more Pipesian than Wrightsian. He says: “jihad, holy fighting in Allah's course, with full force of numbers and weaponry, is given the utmost importance in Islam....By jihad, Islam is established....By abandoning jihad, may Allah protect us from that, Islam is destroyed, and Muslims go into inferior position, their honor is lost, their lands are stolen, their rule and authority vanish. Jihad is an obligation and duty in Islam on every Muslim. “The Islam war is started and ... [will continue] until Islam is spread all over the whole world.”
Sounds like rather less of the good news that Wright claims to have seen in Shazad’s earlier admissions of guilt. Given the weight that Wright gave to Shahzad’s earlier guilty plea, will he now admit that the Pipes analysis is not just a myth?
Yours etc,
PF
Hong Kong
Couldn't decide which picture of Jihad I should use and several seemed appropriate:
There are lots who are Dummies (aka dhimmies) about Jihad
The Jihad is global and multi-faceted
This one covers both the "Jihad as grievance" (Death to Israel)
and
"Jihad as existential threat" (Death to the West)
