It’s preposterous, of course, but nowadays when it comes to discussions of Islam, we have grown inured to the preposterous. More on the latest example of this can be found here.
On Friday, September 18, 2026, Michigan State University’s Muslim Studies Program marked its 20th anniversary at the MSU International Center. The honoree was Mohammed Ayoob, a distinguished professor emeritus of international relations and the program’s founding coordinator. The university’s chief inclusion officer spoke and the program’s director presented a plaque. An anonymous donor put up $50,000 for an endowment in Ayoob’s name. Then Ayoob explained, once more, what the program exists to teach.
Ayoob contends that Islam, as a body of doctrine, was irrelevant to al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, the “so-called Islamist movements” he attributed to American and Israeli policy along with the aftermath of the Soviet collapse in Afghanistan.
This “distinguished professor” Mohammad Ayood turns out to be nothing more than a propagandist and shill for Islam, a protector of the faith who is counting on the ignorance of his audience of Infidels about the texts and teachings of Islam. Ayoob would like them to believe that though the terrorists of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah (he deliberately leaves out the Islamic State, for it would be impossible to claim that with such a name ISIS had “nothing to do” with Islam) routinely quote the Qur’an, and just as those hijackers did on 9/11/2001, utter their war-cry “Allahu Akbar” — “my Muslim God is greater than yours” — whenever they attack the Infidels, Islam “had nothing to do with their attacks.”
No, we are expected to believe that those attacks were a result not of all the Qur’anic passages calling for attacks on Infidels, had nothing to do with Muhammad’s claim in a famous hadith that “I have been made victorious through terror,” but only had to do with Muslim unhappiness with American foreign policy, and anger with the Israeli “occupiers” of Muslim land for refusing to surrender to the demands of Muslims and Arabs.
“It was not Islam that motivated the attacks,” he said of September 11, 2001. “The reality was far more complex and was primarily related to the widespread opposition to American policy in the Middle East, rather than to Islam that was used as a justification for the attacks.”
Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri beg to differ with Mohammed Ayoob. With their attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the Al-Qaeda operatives were attempting to terrorize the Americans, because the United States was seen, correctly, as the leader of the camp of Infidels.
He went further. “The continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, the expansion of settlements, the creeping annexation of the West Bank, and the economic strangulation of Gaza gave Hamas a degree of credibility among segments of the Palestinian population,” Ayoob said.
“The fact that the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority was not only corrupt but was also perceived as an agent of the Israeli occupation increased Hamas’s popularity amongst the Palestinian population. These factors had nothing to do with Islam.”
Hamas initially was able to take over Gaza and expel the Palestinian Authority from Gaza because the latter was thought to be not only more corrupt, but also insufficiently Islamic. Furthermore, Hamas was more ruthless, and quickly overpowered the Fatah troops in Gaza, killing hundreds and forcing those who remained alive out of the Strip. Hamas leaders are fanatical Muslims; the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, like the grasping Mahmoud Abbas himself, are much less devout and more interested in grabbing as much loot as they can from the huge amounts of foreign aid sent to the PA. Mahmoud Abbas and his two sons Tareq and Nasser have managed as a result to accumulate a family fortune now amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mohammed Ayoob has managed to convince the administrators at the University of Michigan to set up a Middle East Studies program that teaches, despite all the contrary evidence, his own claim that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism by Muslims in ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and dozens of other groups — despite the terrorists involved making clear that it was Islam — and not American foreign policy, that impelled them to their terrorism.
After all, it wasn’t American foreign policy that caused Muslim terrorists to bomb the Atocha station in Madrid, killing 192 people. It wasn’t American foreign policy that caused Muslim Chechens to take hostages at the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow, resulting in the deaths of 182 people. It wasn’t American foreign policy that caused Muslim terrorists to place bombs on busses and subway cars in London; It wasn’t American foreign policy that caused Muslim terrorists to unleash attacks across Mumbai, India, killing 166. It wasn’t American foreign policy that caused the attack by Muslim terrorists on the Bataclan nightclub in Paris, in which 90 people were killed. It wasn’t American foreign policy that caused Muslim terrorists to use a truck to mow down and kill 86 French people walking along the promenade in Nice on Bastille Day in 2016. Muslim terrorists are fulfilling the many Qur’anic commands to “strike at the necks of” — that is, to slaughter — unbelievers “wherever you find them.” The goal of Muslims remains is to spread Islam all over the globe. For as Muhammad famously said, “Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated.”
How gullible must one be, to swallow Mohammed Ayoob’s absurd insistence that none of the 50,024 terrorist attacks carried out by Allahu-akbaring Muslims since 9/11/2001 had anything to do with Islam.
Photo credit: Branislav Ondrasik at Wikimedia Commons.