June 8, 2025: Over the last fifty years, Islamic terrorism has accounted for 85 percent of all terrorist related deaths. Nearly 70,000 attacks killed over a quarter million people. Nearly 90 percent of these deaths took place since 2013, and the number of such attacks is increasing. Islam is the second largest religion in the world with two billion adherents. Only Christianity, with 2.7 billion believers is larger. The third largest is Hinduism, the primary religion of India’s one billion people.

Islam is the only religion that comes with its own body of law, Sharia, that is meant to be used in Moslem majority nations. It rarely works out that way, with Saudi Arabia one of the few nations that incorporates Sharia law into its legal system. The Saudis limit some of the more extreme aspects of Sharia. For example, Moslems are obliged to try and convert any non-Moslem or kafir they meet to Islam. If the kaffir refuses, the Moslem is obliged to kill the man. This is considered defending Islam, which sees itself constantly as war with the non-Moslims. Worse, the penalty for a Moslem converting to another religion is death. In practice, these extreme aspects of Islamic law are rarely made government practice. One exception is Saudi Arabia, where no other religion may hold religious services in their own house of worship. Foreign workers conduct religious services in their homes, usually while living in gated compounds reserved for the many foreign workers needed to keep the Saudi economy going.

Moslems worldwide are taught by their local clergy, the imams, that good Moslims must eventually impose Sharia law on any country where they are a minority on its way to becoming a majority. This is called defending Islam and any kaffir who opposes this is attacking Islam. In practice, most Moslems to not consider world, or local, religious domination their goal. The minority of Moslems who are radicals consider defending Islam a task that justified murderous Islamic terrorism. God, or Allah, wills it. The Saudis deal with these radicals by using a traditional Islam penalty, beheading. Some Moslems insist that Islam is the religion of peace. That is only true when all the non-Moslems are dead or in the process of converting. Until that day comes a lot of radical Moslems will be trying to kill as many non-believers as they can. The rest of the world calls this Islamic terrorism and has been increasingly energetic in suppressing it.

Large-scale Islamic terrorism began in the 1970s and changed Arab attitudes towards this perennial problem. Now the wealthiest Arab states, namely those with oil in the Persian Gulf, are recognizing that Islamic terrorism is not just an ancient problem that keeps recurring but, because of affluence, global communications and ease of travel, is a real threat to the lives of most Moslems and the wealth of the unprecedented number of Arabs who now have it. In response Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates or UAE and Qatar have built modern intelligence and internal security capabilities that have been increasingly able to deal with Islamic terrorism within their own borders as well as throughout the Islamic world. This is a modern solution for an ancient problem. But there is more.

Out of this came a realization that we have met the enemy, and they are us. There followed a frank discussion about the characteristics of Islamic culture that nurture and periodically revive Islamic radicalism and terrorism. For over a thousand years every few generations Islamic conservatism got violent. Because of these changes in the Moslem world, the War on Terror has morphed into the War Against Islamic Radicalism. This religious radicalism has always been around, for Islam was born as an aggressive movement that used violence and terror to expand. Moslems long took it for granted but their neighbors didn’t.

Past periods of conquest are regarded fondly by Moslems, who are still taught by many of their religious leaders and teachers that non-Moslims are inferior. The current enthusiasm for violence in the name of God has been building through the 20th and into the 21st centuries because the thousand-year battles with Islamic conservatives have left Moslems, especially Arabs, vulnerable to more advanced cultures.

Historically, Islamic radicalism has flared up into mass bloodshed periodically, usually in response to corrupt governments, as a vain attempt to impose a religious solution on some social or political problem. The current violence is international because of the availability of planet wide mass media that needs a constant supply of headlines, and the fact that the Islamic world is awash in tyranny and economic backwardness. This is why the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, and their desire to establish democracies, sought and failed to do some permanent damage to the Islamic terrorism tradition. The excesses of Islamic terror groups trying to outdo each other in the righteous violence department is recorded and broadcast worldwide. This disgusts most people, Moslems as well as infidels.

As a result, there is growing condemnation of Islamic radicals by the media and leading Islamic clerics in Moslem nations. These changes have not come as quickly as many hoped, but at least they appear to have arrived. This came as a surprise to many Moslems. That’s because the past has had a huge influence on Islamic societies. For many, this resistance to change is considered a religious obligation. Many Moslems consider democracy a poisonous Western invention. There is still a lot of affection for the clerical dictatorship of legend, a just and efficient government run by virtuous religious leaders. The legends are false and there are centuries of failed religious dictatorships to prove it. But this legend has become a core belief for many Moslems and tends to survive assaults by reality or the historical record.

Islamic radicalism itself is incapable of mustering much military power, and the movement largely relies on terrorism to gain attention. Most of the victims are fellow Moslems, which is why the radicals eventually become so unpopular among their own people that they run out of popular support and fade away. This is what is happening now. The 2003 American invasion of Iraq was a clever exploitation of this, forcing the Islamic radicals to fight in Iraq, where they killed many Moslems, especially women and children, thus causing the Islamic radicals to lose their popularity among Moslems. This sharp decline in the Islamic nation opinion polls was startling. The revival of Islamic terrorism in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings are reminding people that this religion-based violence is a liability for Islam, not a virtue, and this new spike in Islamic terrorism is again roundly condemned by most Moslems.

For centuries the West did not get involved in these Islamic religious wars, unless attacked in a major way. Moreover, modern sensibilities have made retaliation difficult. For example, fighting back is considered by Moslems as a culturally insensitive War on Islam. Some Western media have picked up on this bizarre interpretation of reality. Historians point out, for example, that the medieval Crusades were a series of wars fought in response to Islamic violence against local Christians, not the opening act of aggression against Islam that continues to the present. The current war on terror is a Crusade. And there are many other Crusades brewing around the world, in the many places where aggressive Islamic militants are making unprovoked war on their non-Moslem neighbors. Political correctness among academics and journalists causes some to try and turn this reality inside out, but a close look at the violence in Africa, Asia and the Middle East shows a definite pattern of Islamic radicals persecuting those who do not agree with them, not the other way around.

While casualties from international terrorism are relatively few, they are intentionally publicized by the killers. In contrast the dead and wounded from all the other wars comprise over 90 percent of all the casualties. The Islamic terrorism looms larger because the terrorists threaten attacks everywhere and at any time, putting a much larger population potentially in harm's way. The more numerous potential victims are unhappy with that prospect. In the West and most Moslem nations, Islamic terrorism remains more of a threat than reality.

Saudi Arabia has been coping with the latest outbreak of Islamic terrorism since the 1970s and has adapted and basically driven most Islamic terrorists out of the country where many Islamic terrorists came from. For example, Osama bin Laden found this out in the 1980s and managed to flee Saudi Arabia, where he was born and raised. Bin Laden and many other Islamic terrorist leaders concluded that the West was at fault here, supplying the ideas and technology that made Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, impossible for Islamic terrorists to operate in. From that came the decision to launch more attacks in the West, to discourage Western nations from supporting Moslem despots and to encourage more Moslems to join the latest round of the eternal Islamic revolution. That worked for a while, but eventually people realized that most of those young men who went off to be Islamic terrorists were never heard from again and that most of their victims were fellow Moslems.