Anti-Jihadism Is Not Anti-Muslim

As a university professor engaged in conversations with my colleagues, I notice a troubling contradiction when it comes to expressions of concern about religious violence. Condemnations of global jihadism are met with accusations of Islamophobia. Yet these same colleagues insist that their critiques of Zionism express no animus toward Jews or Judaism. I do not intend to equate Zionism, a commitment to Jewish national self-determination, with radical jihadism, a political project that seeks to impose Islamic law in the context of a pan-Islamic theocracy, often referred to as the Caliphate. However, the double standard is clear: our current antizionist movement insists that antizionism is not hatred of the Jewish religion, but alleges that warnings about radical jihadism are tantamount to discrimination against the world’s nearly two billion Muslims.

This contradiction is manifest when we consider the Omani terrorist who hijacked FlyDubai Flight 1073, which was carrying over 170 passengers, mostly Israelis. Radicalized by al-Qaeda, he allegedly aimed to crash the plane into Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport, clearly inspired by the 9/11 terror attacks that al-Quaeda orchestrated just over twenty-five years earlier.

In the quarter of a century that has elapsed between 9/11 and this hijacking of Flight 1073, the world has not erupted in cries against the scourge of global jihadism, despite its deathly toll, According to one study, between 1979 and April 2024, radical jihadists committed 66,872 attacks worldwide, causing the deaths of nearly a quarter of a million people, 86.3 percent of them in Muslim-majority countries across the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa (¹).

Certainly my academic colleagues understand that only a fraction of the world’s Muslims embrace radical jihadism. Yet, opposition to radical jihadism is wrongly perceived as hatred of all Muslims. The fallacy of this view is clear when one considers that nearly nine out of ten victims of radical jihadism are themselves Muslim.

In addition, accusations of Islamophobia perpetuate the racism of low expectations by conflating radical jihadists with the rest of the Muslim community. This flattening of identity became abundantly apparent to me when an academic colleague chided me for referring to Houthis rather than calling them “the people of Yemen,” despite the fact that the militant group makes up less than .1 percent of the population of 31 million people.

At the same time, those who make accusations of Islamophobia strenuously claim to support people of color. In fact, one such colleague told me that she condemns Zionism but not radical jihadism because “Europeans displaced Arabs.” This ignores the fact that more than half of Israeli Jews originate not from Europe but instead from the Middle East and North Africa, from communities that predated by one thousand years Islamic conquest of those regions. Moreover, at the same time 700,000 Arabs left or fled Israel in 1948, approximately 850,000 Jews of Arab and North African descent were forced out of Arab and North African lands in which they had lived continuously for thousands of years, a violent population transfer based on religion, not race, of the sort that roiled India and Pakistan the year before, though an order of magnitude smaller. These Jewish refugees, unlike the Arabs who left Israel, have never been acknowledged nor received compensation for their losses
(²).

If criticism of Zionism can be separated from Judaism, then criticism of radical Jihadism, an expansionist, colonizing ideology, must be separated from Islam, one of the world’s deeply cherished religions. The ability to separate political from religious Islam is especially important now that polling demonstrates a sharp statistical split when distinguishing transnational jihadist movements from regional, politically nationalistic organizations. For example, a Pew Research Center study showed that 44% of US Muslims expressed a favorable view of Hamas (³). Analysts note this often reflects sympathy toward Palestinian nationalism or anti-Israel sentiment rather than an endorsement of global, transnational jihadist objectives. As jihadism shifts shape and targets in particular the Jewish and Israeli community of roughly 16 million people worldwide, about 0.2 percent of the world’s population, we must be able to openly discuss a dangerous ideology that aims to radicalize a population of 2 billion people, approximately 25 percent of humanity.

It is possible to critique jihadism without expressing bigotry toward Muslims. First, it is essential to focus critique on the specific political doctrines, state-enforced laws, authoritarian tactics, or policy goals of Islamist groups, such as forced religious conversion and restriction of free expression. Second, refer by name to specific movements, organizations, or authoritarian policies, such as specific extremist or militant political factions, rather than using generalized religious slurs or broad cultural stereotypes. Third, recognize that Islam is a diverse global faith practiced by over a billion people across vastly different cultures, political systems, and personal interpretations, rather than characterizing all Muslims as a monolith. Finally, distinguish faith from state power. Criticizing how a government or political movement uses religion to justify authoritarian control is a form of political or human rights critique; but attributing social or personal ills collectively to individual Muslims is bigotry. Most importantly, be educated about the dangers of jihadism, to avoid conflating this dangerous ideology held by a minority with the entire community. As we have seen with the hatred directed toward Israel, discrimination thrives when ignorance of a people and their faith prevails.