Letter to the editor: How did terrorist chic become a thing?

Two decades after September 2001, the formerly ostracized Islamists have learned to speak the college hipster language of anti-colonization. They remind us of the not-uncommon forced evacuations of border villages almost 80 years ago, and they understandably gripe about many Palestinians living in a stateless “archipelago.”

They go on about Palestinians being oppressed, poor, native, minorities of color, although the such descriptions are hard to contrast with Israeli Jews of recent European, Middle Eastern and North African extraction, many of whom arrived in penniless flight.

Their real motive is found within historic Islamic literature, canonized by almost every Islamic authority. In the texts, the Jew is the greatest enemy, and territory is never to be ceded from Muslim rule. Moderates have answered with counters and stays to these commandments, but that is a difficult sell when the texts are decreed to be the literal, directive word of God and an infallible prophet.

One has difficulty attributing dark passages to non-literal epic prose or poetic symbolism as one can with the Old Testament. Altering borders, granting more visas, or raising the aid we give to states that hate us will not placate them nor take away their casus belli. Don’t be fooled.

Michael Piano

Murrysville