Townhall.com talks to Rudy Giuliani, Mark Steyn and John McCain about Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Mark Bowden, author of “Black Hawk Down,” talks about his recent article, “Torture Isn’t Always Wrong.” George Weigel talks about Faith, Reason and the War Against Jihadism.  Listen here.

Fifty years have passed since Brother Andrew, the man known as “God’s smuggler,” drove his first load of Bibles behind the Iron Curtain. Now, reports WORLD’s Priya Abraham, the 79-year-old evangelist has turned his attention to Islam. To Brother Andrew, the atheism of the Soviet Union was “the good old days.”

Islam “is a far more cruel system,” he told WORLD on a visit to Washington. “Communists would take you prisoner. The Muslims kill you.” Read here about Brother Andrew and the “good jihad.”

Moez Masoud preaches love and relationships,  compassion toward homosexuals, and tolerance of non-Muslims. The imams who outlawed art and music are misinterpreting Islam, he says. Masoud is a 29-year-old imam — a tele-imam, if you will — is one of a growing number of Muslim teachers who are promoting to the young and faithful a kinder, gentler Islam. The Washington Post reports:

As a “contemporary figure,” Masoud is fast becoming an influential star among youth from “a middle-class full of yearning” who will eventually become decision-makers across the Middle East, Schleifer said. And as a product of American-founded schools in the region, Masoud is able to speak with authority about Western values in a way many others can’t. His most recent show, a 20-part series that aired this fall on Iqra, one of the region’s leading religious channels, attracted millions of viewers from Syria to Morocco.

All over the world, committed Islamists are killing peaceful Muslims who refuse to embrace jihad. Which brand of Islam will prevail?

HT: Bill Harris

Only my second week here, and I’m already picking fights with the boss. Marvin Olasky’s article last week (“Jihad or hirabah?”) advocates for an abandonment of the term jihad for describing acts of terror by Islamic extremists for hirabah (banditry) - a position championed primarily by Jim Guirard of the Truespeak Institute. But is this lexicon shift warranted?

As I discussed in an article for The American Thinker in September, “What’s in a name? ‘Jihad’ vs. ‘Hiraba,’” the support for this shift in terms of Islamic law is very suspect. William McCants of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point notes several reasons why caution must be used with this approach, and Pentagon analyst Stephen Coughlin recently noted that virtually all of the Islamic supporters of the Truespeak lexicon are associated with Muslim Brotherhood front groups, which has been the ideological incubator of virtually every single Islamic terrorist group in the world.

Author and Middle East expert Walid Phares contends that this drawing this jihad-hirabah distinction actually hinders us from understanding the true nature of the threat from Islamic terrorists: (more…)

Are Muslim suicide bombers mujahideen (holy warriors) who participate in jihad and become shahidin (martyrs)? Or are they mufsidoon (evil-doers) engaged in hirabah (unholy war against society) and heading not to paradise but to jahannam (eternal hellfire)?

Muslims originally used the term hirabah to condemn vicious attacks by members of barbarian tribes who murdered or enslaved those they fought and defeated. Such barbarians engaged in “war against society,” often attacking — as do today’s terrorists – without discriminating between soldiers and civilians.

Muslim terrorists say they are not mufsidoon because the civilian adults they kill are aiding and abetting fighters against Islam, and because the children they kill would grow up to become aggressors. How many other Muslims follow that train of thought? The question of definition—jihad or hirabah—is crucial for Muslims, but most Americans are unaware of the debate.

Early in 2003 I search Lexis-Nexis and found seven references to hirabah in the previous 90 days and thousands to jihad. Islamic scholars were debating, though. For example, Ezzeddin Ibrahim of the United Arab Emirates stated that “what occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, is one of the most loathsome of crimes, which in Islam goes under the name of al-hirabah.”

Similarly, Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic Studies at American University, said that “al-Qaeda’s brand of suicide mass murder and its fomenting of hatred among races, religions, and cultures do not constitute godly or holy jihad—but, in fact, constitute the heinous crime and sin of unholy hirabah.” Tamman Adi, director of the Islamic Cultural Center in Eugene, Ore., also argued that “the masterminds of international terrorism are not fighting a jihad, they are hirabah thugs.”

I searched Lexis-Nexis again yesterday and found only three references to hirabah over the past 90 days, versus 719 references to jihad in the past week alone. But when we use the word jihad in relation to terrorism, our choice of words honors an activity that should instead be given the dishonorable ID of hirabah.

While Christian schools train up children to be productive in society, an Islamic madrassa in Pakistan teaches them that it is desirable to destroy it. The Washington Times reports:

Muhammad is a star student at the Arabia Taeem-ul-Quran madrassa in Lahore because in three years, he managed to memorize the entire Koran, hundreds of pages in an ancient language that is rarely spoken and that neither he nor nearly 100 fellow students can understand. Asked whether he could imagine himself attending a jihadist training camp one day, he replied: “It is my wish to do that, to defend Islam by the grace of God.”

As Steven Emerson revealed in his book American Jihad, certain mosques and Islamist meetings in the U.S. openly teach jihad. Thorny question: Should that be illegal?