Contributed by: filbert Tuesday, September 18 2007 @ 01:10 PM CST
American Thinker[*1] :
What’s in a name? When it comes to identifying what we are fighting against in the war for our civilization, quite a lot. Members of a movement among military and intellectual circles want to avoid asserting that we are fighting against “jihad” because that term is loaded with religious significance in Islam, replacing it with “hiraba“, to highlight the criminal nature of Islamic terrorists:
Walid Phares, writing in American Thinker several weeks ago, challenged these advocates. As Phares noted in his article, Preventing the West from Understanding Jihad[*2] :
The good holy war is when the right religious and political authorities declare it against the correct enemy and at the right time. The bad jihad, called also Hiraba, is the wrong war, declared by bad (and irresponsible) people against the wrong enemy (for the moment), and without an appropriate authorization by the “real” Muslim leadership. According to this thesis, those Muslims who wage a Hiraba, a wrong war, are called Mufsidoon, from the Arabic word for “spoilers.” The advocates of this ruse recommend that the United States and its allies stop calling the jihadists by that name and identifying the concept of Jihadism as the problem. In short, they argue that “jihad is good, but the Mufsidoon, the bad guys and the terrorists, spoiled the original legitimate sense.”
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