In a world whose main elements are becoming opaque for an increasing number of people, is Muslim jihadism going to disappear, or at least greatly weaken? That seems unlikely both in view of the fanatically ideological commitment of its promoters and because people are inclined to look in an amorphous world for something they perceive as more certain.

The Muslim world is permeated with a clear-cut recipe for an apocalyptic totalitarian future. This does not contradict the possibility that even more Muslims will reject extremism. Some surveys show declining public support for suicide bombings among many Muslim populations. A 2009 Pew study, however, also found that more than 20 percent of Muslims in Indonesia, Jordan, and Egypt (more than 100 million radical Muslims**) have confidence in Osama bin Laden doing “the right thing in world affairs.” Among Nigerian Muslims this percentage was over 50 percent. When President Barack Obama said in his Cairo speech of June 2009 that the extremists were a “small but potent minority,” he was clearly understating the problem.

 

The Pew study and other data indicate that there are many more current adherents of extremist Islam than the number of Nazis at the time Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. They are far from a majority in the Muslim world. The same, however, is true of the committed moderate and secular Muslims on the other side of the ideological spectrum. These are also less well organized. A large, presently uncommitted center will usually side with the likely winner”.

“If a fear society is repressive enough, it will appear to an outside observer to consist of only true believers when in reality it may have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of doublethinkers living in terror.”

Therein lies the greater danger for Jews, Israel and the west, for while the vast majority of Muslims, in the TT’s opinion, may indeed reject violent jihad, the overwhelming majority however, would find it very difficult to challenge let alone to disagree with the stealth jihad, or in other words the Islamization of the west, in any significant way. So in regards to the violent jihad, the Muslim center needs to be fought for, but in the stealth jihad, they have to be considered an automatic fifth column. KGS

** The Pew research document itself is not explicit but if you take the number of Muslims in specific countries mentioned there and multiply them with the percentage of people who share Bin Laden’s world view and add them up, you come out at about 100 million. These are convinced Bin Laden adherents and as said they are more than Hitler had followers when Germany marched into Poland in 1939. People are simply not aware how big the jihadi Muslim problem is. If you had the figures for the other tens of Muslim countries, it would increase further. A hundred million is already a big enough figure to make an impression.