I hope our readers took

I hope our readers took time out from the election coverage to read Daniel Pipes’ Jihad and the Professors, posted by Trunk yesterday morning. Pipes demonstrates how members of the professoriate across the United States are telling anyone who will listen that “jihad is a struggle without arms,” a “constant struggle of Muslims to conquer their inner base instincts, to follow the path to God, and to do good in society.” Pipes also demonstrates that, in fact, to most Muslims jihad means what it has always meant — “the compulsory, communal effort to expand the territories ruled by Muslims.”
Bat Ye’or is another historian who will not whitewash the concept of jihad. She has shown that, when it comes to non-Muslims, jihad leads to bloodshed and servitude, not the brotherhood of man. In this column in the Washington Times, Diana West describes how Muslims jeered Ye’or at a recent Georgetown University conference. Worse, the student organizers of the conference apologized to the Muslim community for staging the event. It seems clear that, in West’s words, “decades of political correctness and cultural relativism” have brought us to the point that academia feels compelled to reject, on doctrinal grounds, “the historical testiimony of millions of human victims of jihad,” including several thousand American victims.