Nor do we describe our enemy as “jihadists” or “Islamists” because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.
This is ridiculous. "Understanding" our enemies should be for the purpose of killing them--not granting their main strategy legitimacy. Our enemies want to kill us and they draw legitimacy from jihad and their religion, as the author says:
[The] fact is, the ideologies of radical Islam have the intrinsic capacity to prompt Muslims to violence and intolerance vis-à-vis the ‘other,’ irrespective of grievances. … Being able to understand all this, being able to appreciate it without any conceptual or intellectual constraints is paramount for Americans to truly understand the nature of the enemy and his ultimate goals.”
Yes. They don't represent all Moslems--or even most--but they represent a sizable minority and some other fraction has sympathy for the motives of the jihadis. We need to stop "understanding" our enemies to look for reasons to justify jihad against us.
Don't wonder why they hate us. Wonder why they hate.
And then kill them, of course. Because they won't stop killing us until we kill them and therefore purify the Moslem world which cannot seem to do the job themselves.
