Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Sign up to attend Michael’s talk in Los Angeles on Thursday, November 20: HERE.
In 2025, Hamas and Hezbollah flags became regular sights on Ivy League college campuses, a Muslim immigrant who embraced an unindicted coconspirator in bombing plots in New York City became its mayor, presidential envoys chatted with Hamas and an Al Qaeda leader who used to have a $10 million reward on his head visited the White House and met with the president.
The mainstreaming of Islamic terrorism didn’t happen overnight. A decade ago, the Obama administration backed the Al Qaeda militias that would eventually go on to take over Syria and first forced Israel to negotiate with Hamas after the kidnapping and murder of three teens.
What went on under the cover of plausible deniability a decade ago, where our government pretended we were backing the Free Syrian Army, a ‘democratic’ and ‘secular’ movement, (which critics like me pointed out was just Al-Qaeda in drag), or where our negotiators did not directly meet with Hamas, where anti-Israel campus groups claimed that they supported BDS rather than mass murder, and Muslim politicians denied they were terrorists, is out in the open.
How we got here was inevitable once American leaders responded to 9/11 by trying to draw distinctions between good Islamization and bad Islamization, between moderates and extremists, between good terrorists and bad terrorists in the hopes of dividing our enemies.
The false ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ paradigm, which no Muslim leader or movement ever actually accepted, didn’t divide up Islamic terrorists, it mainstreamed them. We lost the ability to draw lines and with it any larger sense of who we were, who they were and what we had set out to accomplish by fighting them until all we wanted to do was find someone to surrender to.
Opportunistic realpolitik led us to the conclusion that a moderate was any Muslim terrorist group willing to pretend they weren’t our enemies, and an extremist was a Muslim terrorist group unwilling to lie to us. Only the purest ISIS terrorists are still considered extremists while the Al Leader and former ISIS ally who took over Syria has joined our anti-ISIS coalition to fight ISIS.
America has reached the stage of allying with ‘moderate’ Al Qaeda against ‘extreme’ Al Qaeda.
While the Al-Jolani visit to the White House was a low point, the unfortunate truth was that we had allied with Taliban warlords in Afghanistan, as long as they weren’t officially Taliban warlords right this moment, and we had backed Al Qaeda militias in Syria, as long as they pretended they weren’t Al Qaeda right now. What seemed like opportunistic realpolitik in the moment didn’t actually change the terrorists, it changed us by defining terrorist deviancy down to nothing.
That is also why we were taken in by the Taliban’s promises of a ‘peaceful transition’ in Afghanistan and why presidential envoys in pursuit of a ‘ceasefire’ are now meeting with and praising Hamas terrorist leaders. Instead of finding moderates, we just gave up our standards.
On college campuses and on the liberal side of the political nexus, support for non-violent opposition to Israel gave way to support for Oct 7 and the violent mass murder of Jews. After being initially greeted with polite revulsion, the terrorist side, including Zohran Mamdani, won the argument with the moral pragmatism of genocide lies. Accuse Israel enough of the worst crimes and suddenly no tactic, including rape and burning children alive, will seem too awful.
Mainstreaming Islamic terrorists happens when we think about anything and everything (regional stability, an end to the fighting, the horrors of war, the tribal cause) rather than look at what we’re doing and what the long term consequences of normalizing terrorism will be.
When the PLO and its Soviet-backed Jihadis first began hijacking planes, the whole thing was deplored, condemned and then rewarded. By 1977, Jimmy Carter became the first president to call for a ‘Palestinian’ state. What had the PLO done to merit a state? They hijacked planes.
What did Hamas and the PLO do this time around to merit a state? October 7.
What did the faction of Al Qaeda that seized control of Syria do to merit high-level diplomatic visits? They seized control of Syria.
That’s why we lost the ‘War on Terror’ because we weren’t fighting to win, but to compromise. And at the heart of every compromise was the notion that the aims of the Jihadists were finite, that they would settle for parts of Israel, for Afghanistan or Syria, and not want anything else.
Believing that we can give in, reward terrorists for their terrorism without encouraging them to pursue the furthest breadth of their Islamic supremacist ambitions, is foolishly naive and wrong.
All we were really doing by validating their demands was offering them a down payment, a finger that would later be exchanged for a hand, a country later to be exchanged for the world. There is no moderate Islamic Jihadist out there who is willing to settle for less than the Koran promised him. Men willing to kill and die on the promise of paradise are not compromisers.
Our compromises did not bring us peace with Islam, it only compromised our ability to resist even the worst Jihadists and even the worst atrocities because we have normalized evil.
College campuses where the PFLP was celebrated now fly Hamas flags and eventually will fly ISIS flags. We invited a local Al Qaeda leader to the White House and we negotiated with Hamas, how long until we’re directly negotiating with Al Qaeda and inviting ISIS over?
A decade ago, it would have been hard to find open supporters of Islamic terrorism among us, today, especially in certain university and liberal circles, they’re everywhere. Will it stop here?
Of course not.
If there’s any lesson this should teach us, it’s that it will not stop here. Radical movements have no brakes. Neither do we once we start appeasing them. The same political culture that has normalized every deviancy and evil, is now normalizing Islamic terrorism. The fallacy of the moderate/extremist terrorist has broken down so badly that hardly anyone mentions it now.
Al Qaeda, ISIS and Hamas, like our own political radicals, have shown that they can break down the walls of the civilized order through horrifying acts and make them into the new normal.
Whatever atrocity happens next, we will learn to accept it until we either wake up and start drawing lines, or wake up and realize that we no longer have the power to draw any lines.
2025 is the year Islamic terrorism went mainstream. 2026 can be the year we stop tolerating it.
