Causes of Jihad

"...the American flight from Beirut after the bombings in 1983, the American flight from Somalia after "Black Hawk down," the attack on the U.S. embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, 9/11, the continual bombing of Iraq under the Clinton administration, the economic sanctions against Saddam's regime that Muslims saw as choking the Iraqi people. The Iraq war, as the critics see it, overwhelms the American attack on the Taliban and bin Laden, the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan, bin Laden's survivor charisma, the Pakistani madrassa machine, General Pervez Musharraf's retreat from Waziristan, the Saudi Wahhabi multitentacled missionary-money machine--still the most influential conveyer of anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian hatred in the world--the existence of Israel, the Israeli retreat from Lebanon in 2000, Palestinian suicide bombings, the resurgence of Hezbollah, the triumph of American pop culture in Muslim lands, the Satanic Verses, Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, the Western assault on traditional sexual ethics and the God-ordained malfe domination of the Muslim home, the constant, positivist legal assault on the Holy Law, American and European support for Muslim dictatorships, the Western-centered, Western-aping, increasingly brutal Muslim regimes that have transgressed against God ever since Napoleon routed the mameluks outside Alexandria in 1798, and the unbearable Western military supremacy that reversed a millennium of nearly uninterrupted Muslim triumphs. To these critics, the Iraq war somehow is uglier than the whole cosmological affront of the modern world: Western Christians, Jews, and atheists on top; Asian Buddhists, Confucians, and Shintoists gaining power; the Hindu pantheists rising; and the Muslims, Allah's chosen people, descending..."

- Reuel Marc Gerecht