The Age of Jihad

“As a result, an air of fear hangs over society, regardless of the fact that the likelihood of falling victim to such an attack is very low indeed. But this is how terror works.”

When a group of Muslim men shouted “Jihad, Jihad, Jihad” at a protest following Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians, the London metropolitan police downplayed the incident stating that “[t]he word has a number of meanings.” While this is not wrong, the recent terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall, which killed at least 140 people and maimed and injured many more, serves as a bloody reminder of what we are up against: a fundamentalist ideology that views the murder of innocents and non-combatants as part of a “holy war” against infidels.

The semantic elasticity of the term “jihad” makes it the perfect watchword for Muslim extremists organizing and operating in Muslim-minority countries as it gives them plausible deniability and allows them to denounce any criticism as Islamophobia, which as Andrew Cummins put it, is “a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.” Meanwhile, we do not know when and where the next Islamist terror attack will occur. As a result, an air of fear hangs over society, regardless of the fact that the likelihood of falling victim to such an attack is very low indeed. But this is how terror works.

After a number of years during which Islamic terrorism seemed more of a lone-wolf phenomenon than a well-orchestrated strategy (consider, for example, the 2020 terrorist attack in Vienna), October 7th and the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow on March 22nd have shown that organized jihadism is back. We live in an age of violent jihad, with international terrorist networks pulling the strings. These networks have embedded themselves in Muslim communities around the globe, including in metropolitan areas in the West. This is, of course, not to say that Muslim citizens are all potential terrorists; however, it does say something about the purported “religion of peace” and its role as a fifth column undermining Western liberal-democratic society.