Finally, A Contemporary Answer

…to the question posed in the title of an earlier post. And it’s in the first full paragraph on page 4 (which is the second page of the Introduction) of Party of Defeat, by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson:

The warriors of the jihad are promised salvation for slaughtering innocents; their highest honor is to sacrifice themselves for Allah by murdering infidels; their goal is to restore an Islamic empire that once stretched into the heart of Europe, until it was defeated in the battle of Vienna on September 11, 1683. Three hundred years later, Osama bin Laden turned this date of humiliation into a day of vengeance—and revival. Striking America’s homeland on September 11, 2001, jihadists murdered thousands of unsuspecting civilians, and came within a terrorist attack or two of destabilizing the American economy and unleashing chaos.

And the book as a whole serves as a very lucid answer, also, to the question of how the war in Iraq fits into the overall Global War on Terror—or, more precisely, the global war on Islamic jihadists.