16 March, 2026
From September 2012 to May 2013, I was a Fulbright grantee in Cairo studying Islamic philosophy and Arabic. Since I was recognizably Western and spoke Arabic reasonably well, I had grown accustomed to having impromptu political debates, especially with people who wanted to interrogate me about America’s support for Israel.
I once found myself in a taxi with two other passengers: a woman in a niqab and a younger girl—her daughter, I assumed—around nine or ten years old, dressed similarly. When the woman realized I was American and could understand Arabic, she tearfully launched into a biased rendering of Israel-Palestine history: the Jews came and stole the Palestinians’ land, and so on. I listened politely until she said, repeatedly and with feeling, “Open your heart to Hamas”.
At that point, I felt I had to respond forcefully. I don’t remember my exact words, but I recall using abadan—“never”—and irhab—“terrorism”. “No—they’re liberators!” she protested. If I’d been speaking English, I would have expressed myself even more strongly: “My heart is resolutely closed to their demonic foulness” would be in the proper register. That would remain true even if I accepted her version of the conflict, which I don’t.
When I disembarked, the driver said: “She’s right, you know”.
“No”, I insisted. “She’s not.”
No one in the United States has ever told me to open my heart to Hamas, al-Shabaab, Islamic State, Boko Haram, or any other jihadist organization. Nevertheless, few seem to grasp the evil or gravity of the ideology that unites them. While white-supremacist terrorism is rightly named and condemned, jihadist terrorism is described as “violent extremism”. That tells us nothing about the motivating ideology. No one’s last words have been “Long live violent extremism!” Attributing an atrocity to extremism is no more informative than attributing it to badness.
Sometimes this is recognized, and the importance of condemnations of specific ideologies is stressed. In 2017, following the vehicular murder of Heather Heyer at the hands of a white supremacist at the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, the Deans of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder—where I was a graduate student—instructed faculty to bring up the incident in class. We were supposed to discuss the racism that motivated it and reaffirm the university’s commitment to tolerance: “The message sent to the nation at Charlottesville is one we have to act upon”.
To judge by the absence of any previous exhortations along these lines, these deans did not see any teachable moment in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2015 San Bernardino attacks, or Kori Ali Muhammad’s murder of four white men in Fresno, California a few months before the Charlottesville incident. The Fresno episode, which received a sliver of the media attention afforded the slaying of Heyer, was officially classified as a racial hate crime and not a terrorist attack, though the perpetrator was shouting “Allahu Akbar!” But racism and jihadism are not mutually exclusive. That is one point that might have come up in a classroom discussion of that incident.
One detail from the San Bernardino attack haunts me. The perpetrators, a young couple with a six-month-old daughter, murdered fourteen of their coworkers at a county health department party before being killed in a shootout. Some of the victims had recently thrown a baby shower for that child. An ideology had so corrupted the human heart that new parents could orphan their baby to murder the people who celebrated her birth.
I suspect that racist violence is more readily condemned because it fits comfortably within what has become the standard picture of evil. We can locate such actions in a history that includes slavery and imperialism, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust. The Nazi reputation for evil is not only very well deserved, but actually understates matters. It is nearly trivialized by their frequent depiction as killable movie baddies. Nonetheless, treating Nazis as the sole paradigm of evil has produced a kind of moral tunnel vision. Those who pride themselves on thinking globally often have a parochial conception of evil.
The Nazis took center stage in our mental conception of evil after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a moment at which radical Islam was at its lowest point of political power in centuries. It has, however, been slowly regaining its strength and consolidating its power. But because that power is not concentrated in a single empire but dispersed among 1.8 billion believers in dozens of countries, each of which is weak in isolation, it might slip through our mental threat-detection software.
It doesn’t help that Westerners are far less educated about the deep history of tyranny here. Few know about Mahmoud of Ghazni’s seventeen invasions of India, or Aurangzeb’s practice of having Hindus and Sikhs trampled by elephants. How many know about the cruelties of Timur the Lame (a.k.a., Tamerlane), who left pyramids of skulls in his wake, and is said to have put tens of thousands—and perhaps as many as one hundred thousand—Hindu prisoners of war to death in a single day? Every school child knows about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, but how many know about the equally barbaric trans-Saharan slave trade? Educated people have heard of the Armenian genocide, but few know about the fatwa that facilitated it, or that thousands converted to Islam to save themselves from extermination.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “The Nazis believed in a master race, the militant Islamists believe in a master faith. They just disagree who among them will be the master of the master faith”. I think there are at least three reasons that the master faith is even more sinister than the ideology of the master race.
First, the master faith can more easily attract converts. Non-whites, most of the world’s population, are unlikely to find white supremacism appealing. No form of racism seems likely to unify people across races since not everyone can be part of the master race—but a master faith can do that. Moreover, Hitlerian pseudo-science is a less compelling ideology than Islamism, which claims the authority of a 1,400-year religion rich with stories and rituals. Authoritarian secular ideologies such as Nazism may be quasi-religious in their fervor, but in the end lack the psychological power that religions have.
A more easily transmissible disease is, all else equal, a worse disease. A very transmissible disease might be vastly more destructive than one that is more lethal but less transmissible. COVID-19 killed many more people than Ebola despite the latter’s being more lethal, precisely because COVID-19 is much more transmissible. The same holds for ideologies. Nazism is an Ebola-like ideology: jihadism is a bit more like COVID-19.
Second, the existence of millions of non-violent Muslims perversely makes the jihadist threat worse in certain respects. Imagine an alternate world where millions of Germans sincerely believed Mein Kampf was an elaborate metaphor for peaceful spiritual struggle, while the most thoroughly indoctrinated are genocidal extremists. In that world, Nazism probably wouldn’t have produced such extreme violence so quickly, but it would have be much harder to exclude from polite circles. Nazis could conceal themselves more easily, using the penumbra of “moderates” as a protective membrane. They could also recruit more effectively, gradually radicalizing new converts who are at first drawn in by the humane interpretations of core texts. This is the advantage jihadists have in our world.
Anti-racist activists often stress that racism can be subtle and insidious enough to go unnoticed. This can get taken too far to the point that everything starts to look racist, but there’s a legitimate point here. When racial terrorism earned Birmingham, Alabama, the nickname “Bombingham”, the problem clearly wasn’t confined to those manufacturing and planting bombs. Something similar is true of jihadist terrorists. Muslims who are peaceful, in the sense that they would never commit violent acts themselves, may nonetheless participate in a culture of violence to a variety of degrees, some of which make them complicit. They may openly sympathize with those who carry out attacks, offer excuses on their behalf, or simply decline to condemn them.
Finally, jihadism’s emphasis on martyrdom makes it especially difficult to counter. Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower describes mujahedeen in Afghanistan weeping because they survived Russian attacks—a reaction that would have been incomprehensible to the Nazi rank-and-file. Things were different with the Imperial Japanese, with their kamikaze pilots, and the Tamil Tigers, who used suicide bomb attacks in Sri Lanka. But these groups killed themselves to advance group interests. Jihadists, with their eschatological worldview, are happy to bring their countrymen with them to the hereafter. That’s why an Islamist regime such as Iran possessing nuclear weapons is such a terrifying prospect: it is impossible to deter someone willing, even eager, to be destroyed.
The danger is enormous. Fifty-seven governments belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, controlling over two billion people, and they are not shy in throwing their economic and political weight around Islamist goals, especially as pertain to blasphemy. In thirteen of these countries, apostasy—leaving Islam—is punishable by death. Blasphemy laws operate across much of the Muslim world not as archaic holdovers but as actively enforced policy. Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian, spent eight years on death row for alleged blasphemy before finally being spirited to Canada (mass protests erupted to prevent her escape).
These states are not the only, or even the primary, enforcers. Theo van Gogh was murdered on an Amsterdam street in broad daylight for making a film critical of Islam’s treatment of women. In 2015, twelve members of the Charlie Hebdo staff were murdered in their Paris office for publishing cartoons. Danish cartoonists who drew Muhammad still live under constant protection. Salman Rushdie lived under fatwa for decades before being stabbed on stage in New York in 2022—thirty-three years after Ayatollah Khomeini’s edict calling for his death for writing The Satanic Verses.
Remember Molly Norris? No? You’re not alone. In 2010, in response to violent episodes following cartoons Muslims found offensive, she proposed “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”. Inundated with threats, she tried to recant, but it was too late. Norris reportedly went into hiding on FBI advice. Five years later, follow-up stories confirmed she was still hiding. Since 2015, nothing new has been reported. The media seem uninterested in her plight. Had a cartoonist been driven permanently underground by neo-Nazis, we’d hear about it incessantly. There’d be no end of the calls to “say her name”. Instead, she’s been memory-holed.
Our capitulation to jihadism is remarkable. We self-censor, rationalize our cowardice, and forget those who refused to submit. Meanwhile, Islam is the world’s fastest-growing major religion, projected to rival Christianity in global adherents by mid-century. The math is alarming: if only a small fraction of 1.8 billion Muslims who can potentially become radicalized embrace jihadism, then we have tens of millions of people who accept a totalizing, supremacist ideology that calls for the subjugation or death of those who refuse to submit. Does anyone believe that this threat will not be worse in the future if we continue our current course?
These evils are not isolated incidents. They are manifestations of a unified force for evil that will not go away simply because we decide to avert our eyes. To resist the jihadists, the free world needs a clarity and resolve equal to theirs. Above all, we must see jihadism for what it is: an evil at least as bad as Nazism.
Editor’s Note: This essay was written in November 2025, the month after a man, Jihad Al-Shamie, attacked a synagogue in Manchester on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, and three months before two gunmen, Sajid and Naveed Akrim, killed 15 people at Bondi Beach during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah; the Islamic State claimed credit for the latter attack. It was submitted to The Philosophers’ Magazine on 9 March, 2026. In the week before it was submitted, a gunman wearing a sweatshirt that read “Property of Allah” killed three people and wounded 15 in Texas, and two men, Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, attempted to set off nail bombs at a protest in New York State; when detained by the police, they said they supported the Islamic State. In the week during which the article was edited, a man, Mohamed Jalor, killed one person and wounded two others in an attack in a classroom, during which he shouted “Allahu Akbar”, and another man, Mohammad Ghazali, whose brother was a commander in Hezbollah, attempted to massacre Jewish schoolchildren at a synagogue in Dearborn, Michigan. The New York Times headlines following some of these events were representative of the broader media coverage: “At 13, He Was Selling Sneakers. At 18, He’s Facing Terror Charges”; “The Michigan Synagogue Attacker Was a Quiet Restaurant Worker”.
Spencer Case is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Arizona Center for the Philosophy of Freedom (Freedom Center) and the host of Micro-Digressions: A Philosophy Podcast.
