Jihad Denial in the McGill International Review

Ronny al-Nosir, who authored the piece, takes issue with our using the word "terrorist" to describe the Muslim "revert" who killed a soldier standing guard at the National War Memorial and who then took his shotgun and his grievances to Parliament Hill. His "reasoning":

No one can deny that religion is the principal factor. The man was a Muslim. As mentioned above, Muslims are often arbitrarily branded terrorists. Profiling is nothing new. We must realize that in fact, a quasi-totality of Muslims (who represent 23% of the world’s population and are around 1.6 billion strong)[8] has no terrorist aims. Inversely, we must also see that, out of the rest of the (non-Muslim) inhabitants of the world, there are some that could be qualified as terrorists. The bottom line is that “terrorist” has become a sensationalist term: the media loves it because it makes good headlines and politicians love it because it allows them to further advance their goals.

The real bottom line is that jihad is an essential, eternal component of Islam and that, over the centuries, many (though not, of course, all) Muslims have waged it in order to a advance their goals of global conquest for the sake of empowering Islam via the spread of sharia. That being so, I have no problem calling those waging the jihad du jour "terrorists," although I happen to prefer the more accurate term: straight up jihadis.