Islamists wage holy war in Mumbai, India

By Andrew L. Jaffee, netwmd.com

An Islamist group calling itself the “Deccan Mujahideen” went on a killing spree Wednesday in Mumbai, India. These terrorist cowards, organized as “[t]eams of gunmen,” savagely killed at least 144 people, wounding at least 300, and “specifically targeted Britons and Americans.” The “team” which besieged the “landmark Taj Mahal hotel … were targeting foreigners. They kept shouting: ‘Who has U.S. or U.K. passports?’” The Islamists “stormed luxury hotels, a popular restaurant, hospitals and a crowded train station,” in other words concentrated their attacks on civilians. This “previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen” is comprised of extremist Muslims, bent on terrorizing and killing non-Muslims (”infidels”), waging what they consider to be a “holy war,” all in the name of Islam. Some people, especially in the politically-correct camp of terrorist appeasers, like the “scholar” John Esposito, would accuse me of jumping to conclusions and/or defaming all Muslims. These appeasers would be wrong because, in their attempts to whitewash Muslim extremism, they overlook — probably purposefully — the obvious truth.

This Muslim terrorist group calls itself the Deccan Mujahideen, the operative keyword being mujahideen, which means, “a military force of Muslim guerilla warriors engaged in a jihad.” Some would add qualifications to the word mujahideen:

… Although the western connotation of jihad and mujahid almost automatically relates to war, the words in their Islamic context don’t necessarily do so. (See the more detailed explanation of the word jihad[)]. …

Of course, they’re talking about the duality of the meaning of jihad, which in one of its two connotations, is explained thusly:

… Arabic words usually have a three-letter root. The root of mujahedeen is J-H-D (?-?-?), meaning “effort”; this is the same root as jihad, which means “struggle”. Mujahid is originally, therefore, someone who exerts effort or struggles. The term has, even in Arabic, taken on meanings that are specifically religious, or specifically military or paramilitary, or both. …

People like John Esposito are waging their own “struggle,” attempting to limit use of the term jihad to solely mean a Muslim peaceful inner battle for self-improvement. This is only half of the picture. There is plenty of historical and scholarly evidence to prove that jihad also means holy war. For example, eminent historian Bernard Lewis, while acknowledging the peaceful side of jihad’s meaning, explains:

… The more common interpretation, and that of the overwhelming majority of the classical jurists and commentators, presents jihad as armed struggle for Islam against infidels and apostates. …

In his declaration of 1998, Osama bin Laden specifically invokes this rule: “For more than seven years the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples.” In view of this, “to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who can, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa mosque and the Haram mosque are freed from their grip, and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim.”

Mohammed himself led the first jihad, in the wars of the Muslims against the pagans in Arabia. The jihad continued under his successors, with a series of wars that brought the Middle East, including the Holy Land, under Arab Muslim rule and then continued eastward into Asia, westward into Africa, and three times into Europe–the Moors in Spain, the Tatars in Russia, the Turks in the Balkans. …

Mansoor Ijaz has no problem recognizing the meaning of jihad as holy war (”Mansoor Ijaz on Jihad and Islam on National Review Online”):

… We Muslims (I am an American whose faith remains that of the humane and dignified Islam) have no legs to stand on anymore when those who proclaim our religion are willing to put a gun to a child’s head, pull the trigger, and call it an act of martyrdom. Islam no longer carries a message of hope, only the indelible impressions of cruelty. Its purveyors are bankrupt of ideas that inspire, and have failed in an ideology that in its very heart today has become hypocritical. To top it all off, America’s Muslims — whose freedom to craft and convey an opposition to the terrorist cancer is protected by the very people those terrorists seek to destroy, sit silent — stone cold silent. …

Another Muslim, Fouad Ajami, also recognizes the warlike connotation of jihad:

… Indeed, that prince of darkness, the jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian sowing death in the streets of Iraq, … warned that the war would continue. “We do not wage our jihad in order to replace the Western tyrant with an Arab tyrant. We fight to make God’s word supreme, and anyone who stands in the way of our struggle is our enemy, a target of our swords.” …

Of course, there are plenty of other respected scholars who know precisely that Muslim extremists are waging holy war (jihad) against apostates. See here and here.

Our new president, while not using the word jihad, yesterday summarized the savage attacks in Mumbai as what they are — terrorism and just terrorism:

… President-Elect Obama strongly condemns today’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and his thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and the people of India. These coordinated attacks on innocent civilians demonstrate the grave and urgent threat of terrorism. The United States must continue to strengthen our partnerships with India and nations around the world to root out and destroy terrorist networks. We stand with the people of India, whose democracy will prove far more resilient than the hateful ideology that led to these attacks.

While there will probably always be apologists for terrorism, it is important that the majority of decent people know the proper terminology used by Muslim extremists themselves, and that good citizens everywhere permit no sanitization of, or rationalization for, the hateful ideology driving the Islamist war against civilization.
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Cross-posted at netwmd.com and NeoConstant