Tucker Carlson: ‘America had no Islamist terrorism problem before 1948’
Jan 27, 2026
5:00 pm
By Robert Spencer 10 Comments
As Shabbos Kestenbaum notes, America fought its first war against Islamic jihadis, who made their Islamic motivations abundantly clear. Get the details in The History of Jihad. Note also that Carlson says “Yes, they scream ‘Death to America,’ but they do so in response to our behavior in their region, not out of inherent hatred.”
This is a variant of the old libertarian argument against interventionism in the wake of the 9/11 jihad attacks. Ron Paul and Justin Raimondo and others insisted that if we just left them alone, they would leave us alone. The fact that our interventions were misguided and wrongheaded and poorly executed from the start doesn’t change the fact that this is a naive and uninformed argument. In saying this, the libertarians then and Carlson now demonstrate their ignorance of Islamic theology and history. He appears to be unaware of the Qur’anic imperative to “fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah” (8:39), which is an open-ended declaration of war against anyone, no matter how benign and harmless, whose religion is not all for Allah.
The idea that they hate us because of what we’re doing in “their region” also founders on the fact that it wouldn’t be “their region” at all had it not been for a series of aggressive jihad conquests against peoples who were not waging war against the Muslims or threatening them in any way. As The History of Jihad shows, there have been 1,400 uninterrupted years of jihad conquest, and never a period in which there were cordial relations of mutual respect between Muslim and non-Muslim political entities, based on the non-Muslim entities’ good behavior in staying out of “their region.”
|
