(1) ... Fouad Ajami has written, "It was not an isolated band of young men who came America's way on 9/11. They emerged out of the Arab world's dominant culture and malignancies." Those malignancies have many sources; one of those sources is defective theology, and we deny that at our peril ...
(2) ... Poverty, in and of itself, doesn't turn men and women into jihadists. By the same token, however, (Walter) Laaqueur notes that "demographic growth and the incapacity of the Arab governments to find jobs for young people leaving the schools and graduating from the universities" has "contributed to the terrorist potential in the Arab world."
(3) Jihadism isn't caused by the fact of the State of Israel ... as Fouad Ajami writes, Israel is "the deadliest of all Arab alibis" in a political culture formed in part by an ideology of victimhood. Jihadists do not hate the West because of Israel, they hate Israel because it is part of the West -- hence, that standard jihadist trope, "Zionist-Crusaders" ...
The indictment of Israel is also ... an example of the "time-honored tradition in the Muslim world to put most or all of the blame [for] its failures on foreigners rather than on their own shortcomings." This disinclination "to engage in self-criticism" has one of its roots in Islamic supersessionism -- reasons for Muslim failure cannot be the result of any deficiencies in God's final revelation -- and helps explain why the fact and the success of Israel seem to so many Muslims to be the result of a vast global conspiracy against them.
It is an even greater folly not to take jihadist leaders like Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah with great seriousness when they pass sentence:
"Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan [the United States] is absolute ... Regardless of how the world has changed after 11 September, 'Death to America' will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: 'Death to America'."Hassan Nasrallah was not speaking metaphorically. [pp. 56-58]
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