If you had “jihadism gets a PR makeover” on your 2024 bingo card, feel free to mark it off.
Teachers who attended an “anti-Muslim bias” webinar offered by the New York City Department of Education on Feb. 20 were told the meaning of jihad was “struggle” and that it could apply to a person’s effort at self-improvement, showing a video that suggested that a “jihad” could mean always giving your “best effort,” building “friendships across the aisle” or working “to get fit.”
The video also tried to whitewash “sharia” as “personal religious or moral guidance.”
Of course, no one but ultra-lefties view “jihad” this way: Merriam-Webster’s first definition of the word is “a holy war waged on behalf of Islam as a religious duty.” The Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists aren’t interested in, say, shedding pounds from their own bodies but blood from nonbelievers.
When former Hamas leader Khaled Mashal called for a “global day of jihad,” on Oct. 23 following the Hamas attack on Israel, he wasn’t suggesting that Muslims worldwide slow down on the carbs and fats or look to make more friends.
“When the world, America, the West, and the Zionists see . . . that convoys of mujahideen are on their way to shed their pure blood on the land of Palestine, the battlefield will change, the balance of power will change,” he made clear.
In 1998, when Osama bin Laden signed a letter calling for “jihad” against “Jews and crusaders,” his meaning was clearly stated: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”
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Yes, the literal translations may be “struggle.” But the left’s attempt to hide its everyday meaning an Orwellian attempt to twist reality and suit its narrative: Hamas is a group of “freedom fighters”; Jews are “white colonizers”; terrorism is “resistance.”
With educators being taught this bunk in city-run events, it’s only a matter of time before it makes it into classrooms.
This insidious spreading of propaganda has to end now .