Ghost of a flea

The Grand Jihad is an effort to dig deeper into what that national security challenge is, and in particular, to stress that terrorism is only a small subset of it. Islamists consider themselves to be in a “civilizational jihad” — their words, not mine — against the West. They use terrorism to great effect, but the battle proceeds on every conceivable front in our society: the media, the academy, and our politics, law and culture. And their aim is nothing less than the “destruction of the West” — as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide (and probably the most influential Sunni cleric in the world), puts it, “to conquer America” and “conquer Europe.”