300,000 Supporters of Suicide Attacks

Some of the results of the Pew Research Center poll of Muslims in America were startling: twenty-six percent of Muslims between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine affirmed that there could be justification in some (unspecified) circumstances for suicide bombing, and five percent of all the Muslims surveyed said that they had a favorable view of Al-Qaeda. Given the Pew Center’s estimate of 2.35 million Muslims in America, and the total of thirteen percent that avowed a belief that suicide bombings could ever be justified, that’s over 300,000 supporters of suicide attacks. And 117,500 supporters of Al-Qaeda. --Robert Spencer

One more thing. One need not be a supporter of suicide attacks, or of violence as the preferred-at-present instrument of Jihad, to be a menace. The mere swelling of Muslim ranks, of those who, that is, feel that they have a duty to participate, collectively or, under certain conditions, individually, in Jihad to spread Islam, until it "everywhere dominates" as Muhammad said that it must, and Muslims rule everywhere, is a menace to non-Muslims. Why? Because Islam uncompromisingly divides the world between Believers and Infidels. It describes the relationship between the two as one of permanent war, if not necessarily permanent warfare ("war" can be conducted without conventional "warfare"). It divides the land of this world essentially between Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, and Dar al-Harb, the House of War. It is the duty of Muslims to work to expand the former and shrink the latter, until the latter disappears altogether. No reader of Qur'an, Hadith, and sira can deny this, and such denial constitutes an example of deliberate deception -- the "deception" that Muhammad defined as the essence of war ("War is deception") and practiced what he, the Model of Right Conduct (uswa hasana), he, the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, preached.

Even if individual Muslims may harbor secret doubts, secret misgivings, the pressure on them to conform, and to end up out of fear or filial piety or something other than rational heartfelt support,( to end up as Defenders and Thereby Promoters of the Faith) have misgivings, they still offer, in the end, their loyalty not to the Infidel nation-state or Infidels in that state, but to the collective or Community of Islam, the ummah al-islamiyyah. That is as they have been taught, and the amazing hold of Islam on its adherents, the amazing way in which the habit of mental submission is inculcated, free and skeptical inquiry not only discouraged but often severely punished (see what happens to those Muslims, even some scholars of Islam, who during the long 1350-year history of Islam have attempted to question in any way the truth of, or still worse to leave outright, that violently defensive belief-system).

Participants in, or supporters of, suicide murders can garner headlines, and cause alarm. But that alarm should then be translated into study, and that study will reveal that the instruments of Jihad are many, and that, at this point in history, not suicide bombing, but rather the Money Weapon, Da'wa, and Demographic Conquest are the most effective ways to spread Islam within the Bilad al-kufr, the Lands of the Infidels.