It's A Different World 25 Years On
A quarter-century ago, in September of 2001, the chief aim of jihadist terrorism in the West was to horrify free populations and intimidate their leaders into submitting to Islamist demands. Coercion was the blunt logic behind terrorism for decades, if not centuries. But over the past 3 years, jihadists have been furnished with a very different incentive to draw blood. Among a segment of the free world, terrorism no longer primarily horrifies; rather, it thrills and inspires. Acts of murderous violence, therefore, have also become a means of gaining support for jihad in certain groups of sympathetic thought in the West. I’ll put it another way. In America, terrorism now has the additional power to seduce, and, I kid you not, be cool. Terrorism has long been used as a rallying cry of recruitment in the Muslim world and in countries with no tradition of individual liberty or classical liberal thought or civilized behavior. ...