My Preface to the paperbound 2008 edition of The Legacy of Jihad, written in late 2007, included this observation:
During mid-November, 2007, a grim milestone was recorded in the macabre tally being kept assiduously in cyberspace by [The Religion of Peace (TROP) website]: the 10,000th attack by jihad terrorists resulting in some 60,000 dead and 90,000 injured since the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism on September 11, 2001.
[TROP] does not include combat-related statistics, and he acknowledges that the death toll may increase in the days and months following any given attack (as victims die from their injuries), and this rarely gets reported. His tally also excludes the genocide in Darfur committed by the Islamic government in Sudan, and their marauding jihadist militias (the Janjaweed), whose murderous ravages the UN estimated last year had resulted in some 400,000 dead, and 2 million displaced.
[TROP] identified three episodes of such continuous, mind numbing jihadist carnage which had perhaps unsettled him most: Nadimarg, India (3/23/03), dozens of Hindu villagers roused out of their beds and machine-gunned by Lashkar-e-Toiba; Beslan, Russia (9/3/04), some 350 people slaughtered by jihadists—half of them children; Malatya, Turkey (4/18/07), three Christian Bible distributors bound, tortured for hours, then gruesomely murdered by men who acted explicitly in the name of Islam.
Just under six years later, the rate of carnage having escalated, that gruesome tally as of September 10, 2013, was 21,564 attacks. During the recently completed week of August 31 through September 6, 2013, alone, there were 49 jihad terror attacks, including 6 “jihad martyrdom” homicide bombings, resulting in 309 deaths, and 610 critical injuries. Those figures for the entire month of August, 2013, were 260 jihad terror attacks occurring in 25 countries (directed against votaries of 4 non-Muslim “infidel” religions, and also including sectarian Islamic violence between Muslims), causing 161 deaths, and 3412 critical injuries.
The consensus view of orthodox Islamic jurisprudence regarding jihad, since its formulation during the 8th and 9th centuries, through the current era, is that non-Muslims peacefully going about their lives—from the Khaybar farmers whom Muhammad ordered attacked in 628, to those sitting in the World Trade Center on 9/11/01—are “muba’a”, licit, in the Dar al Harb, lands not yet vanquished by jihad war. As described by the great 20th century scholar of Islamic Law, Joseph Schacht,
A non-Muslim who is not protected by a treaty is called harbi, ‘”n a state of war,” “enemy alien”; his life and property are completely unprotected by law…
And these innocent non-combatants can be killed, and have always been killed, with impunity simply by virtue of being “harbis” during endless razzias and or full scale jihad campaigns that have occurred continuously since the time of Muhammad, through the present. This is the crux of the specific institutionalized religio-political ideology, i.e., jihad, which makes Islamdom’s borders, innards, and the further reaches of today’s jihadists, “bloody,” to paraphrase the late Samuel Huntington, across the globe.
I concluded the updated 2008 Preface to The Legacy of Jihad with these comments, which sadly apply to our policymaking elites with even more uniformity today, September 11, 2013:
Julien Benda in his classic 1928 La Trahison de Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals) decried with prophetic accuracy how the abandonment of objective truth abetted totalitarian ideologies, which lead to the cataclysmic destruction of World War II. La Trahison de Clercs of our time remains the nearly complete failure of Western intellectuals to study, understand, and acknowledge the heinous consequences of the living Islamic institution of jihad war.
