We’re told that most Muslims oppose Islamic terrorism and that it’s only a tiny fringe of radicals and extremists who practice “radical Islamic terrorism” (as opposed to‘moderate Islamic terrorism’ in which the moderate participants moderately detonate bombs, moderately stab civilians and moderately ram cars into pedestrians) and that their actions don’t reflect Islam.

Even those who correctly identify the roots of Islamic terrorism in the Koran and Islamic teachings still firmly insist that most Muslims oppose terrorism and only a minority support it.

Is that really true? The answer is that it depends on which Islamic terrorism we’re talking about.

There are four categories of Islamic terrorism.

Caliphate Terrorism – These are terrorist attacks carried out by groups like ISIS which claim that their leader is the Caliph of all of Islam and Muslims who refuse to obey him may be killed.

Islamic Terrorism Against Muslim Countries – Domestic terrorism by Muslim terrorists fighting to replace an insufficiently Islamic government, e.g. Muslim Brotherhood or Al Qaeda.

Islamic Terrorism Against Western Non-Muslim Countries – Terrorist attacks against America or Europe, where large numbers of Muslims live and can become collateral damage.

Islamic Terrorism Against a Non-Muslim Religion – This includes Islamic terrorism targeting a country seen as defined by a non-Muslim religion such as Israel or India and it also includes Muslim violence inside Muslim countries against non-Muslim minorities such as Christians in India or Hindus in Bangladesh or violence against Christians in mixed countries such as Nigeria.

Most Muslims oppose ISIS and ‘Caliphate’ terrorism directed at Muslims, smaller numbers of Muslims oppose Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood violence that is directed at Muslim governments, significant numbers of Muslims support Al Qaeda terrorism directed at Western countries and majorities of Muslims support violence directed at non-Muslim religious groups.

Qatar’s Doha Institute (Qatar is a state sponsor of Hamas) released a poll after the Oct 7 attacks which found that 67% of those polled in 16 Arab countries supported the attacks and 69% supported Hamas. That same year, 1 in 3 Muslims in America admitted to supporting Hamas, while by 2026, 44% came out ofthe Hamas closet. Since supporting Hamas is still illegal in America, unlike the Middle East, this is likely to be an undercounting in the U.S.

Many insist that Israel is different and the large Muslim support for terror there isn’t reflective of any broader Muslim backing for terrorism, but Muslim support for terrorism in Israel is actually consistent with Muslim support for terrorism against non-Muslim religious groups.

For example, a survey found that 53% of Pakistanis supported Islamic terrorism against Hindus by Lashkar-e-Taiba, but only 34% supported similar terrorist attacks by Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. What was the difference? Lashkar-e-Taiba is covertly backed by the Pakistani government and only targets Hindus, but does not kill Pakistani Muslims, while Tehrik-i-Taliban also carries out attacks against the Pakistani government and kills other Muslims.

Lashkar-e-Taiba has made a point of distinguishing between non-Muslims and Muslims while carrying out its massacres, asking tourists in Kashmir about their religion before killing them in the recent 2025 massacre in Kashmir. This is why so many Muslims support it.

Lashkar-e-Taiba’s position is that it is dedicated to wiping out Hindus and Jews, but that it will not harm fellow Muslims who ‘profess the faith.’ That is enough of a difference for its level of support among Pakistanis to climb from a third to a majority. And this embodies the gap in Muslim support between terror attacks against Muslims and against non-Muslims.

Here’s another example.

In 2004, 67% of Jordanians were supportive of Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in Iraq (ISIS) and only 10% considered it a terrorist group. In 2005, Al Qaeda in Iraq bombed several hotels in Amman, Jordan, killing 59 people, including a wedding party, and the backlash was so severe that its leader released a tape claiming that they had actually been targeting “Zionist intelligence” only to somehow blow up a wedding.

Al Qaeda’s approval rating in Jordan, after it killed fellow Sunni Muslims, dropped from 67% to 20%, and the number who considered it a terrorist group shot up from 10% to 48%.

Did Jordanian Arabs, who are 97% Muslim, fundamentally rethink their support for Islamic terrorism? Not very much. After Al Qaeda killed fellow Muslims, the number of Jordanians who considered Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks to be terrorism rose from 35% to 61%, but support for Hamas only fell from 86% to 73%. The number opposed to killing civilians in an ‘occupied’ Muslim country rose from 77% to 92%, but many supported terrorists killing non-Muslims.

“We ask Allah to have mercy on the Muslims, who we did not intend to target, even if they were in hotels which are centers of immorality,” the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq apologized.

The central issue was not terrorism: it was terrorism against Muslims. Or, more specifically, Sunni Muslims, since Al Qaeda in Iraq had already been bombing Shiite mosques in Iraq.

By 2014, with a clearer distinction between Al Qaeda and ISIS (Osama bin Laden had taken pains to distance Al Qaeda from the ISIS targeting of fellow Muslims), only 44% of Jordanians considered Al Qaeda to be a terrorist group, while 62% thought ISIS was a terrorist group.

So do the majority of Muslims oppose Islamic terrorism? Only when it kills Muslims.

Islamic terrorism is not an absolute for Muslims. Support for it or opposition to it depends on who is carrying it out, why and who the victims are. Islam is both highly legalistic and tribal, and support for Islamic terrorist attacks depends on clerical approval of particular groups and their tactics as well as whether they are attacking a hated non-Muslim group or fellow Muslims.

The Muslim terrorist groups with the broadest approval from Muslims are religiously nationalistic, attacking a non-Muslim religious group with the aim of expelling them from land claimed by Muslims, such as Israel and India, in purported defense of an aggressive Muslim colony, such as Kashmir or Gaza. Such attacks most closely parallel the founding genocides carried out by Mohammed in the early days of Islam, and are the least controversial among Muslims even when terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hamas kill women and children.

Devout Muslims are more drawn to Islamic terrorist groups seeking to firmly establish Sharia law by seizing power in Muslim countries, e.g. Al Qaeda and ISIS: however such groups are controversial among many Muslims who remain loyal to their governments, worry about being targeted and don’t necessarily want to live in a proper Islamic state. Al Qaeda initially won a good deal of Muslim support by focusing its attacks on America even though its larger aim was toppling the Saudi monarchy. Osama bin Laden had built a reputation as a devout global Jihadist who was fighting the Russians and then the Americans. The Iraq War, more than anything else, destroyed Al Qaeda’s reputation among Muslims and birthed ISIS.

Many Muslims are not at all certain that they want to live in the ISIS version of an Islamic State. They are much more comfortable with Islamic terrorists focused on killing non-Muslims in defense of Islamic expansionism than they are with the idea of toppling their own governments. ‘Good’ Muslims terrorists distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims: another reason that some Muslim terrorist groups make a point of sparing non-Muslims during terrorist attacks by quizzing them about Islam as Somalia’s Al-Shabaab did during the Kenya mall attack.

An Islamic terrorist attack in Israel or India isn’t terrorism. An attack in America or the UK might or might not be. While an attack in a Muslim country is almost always seen as terrorism. To Muslims, targets matter more than tactics. Rather than opposition to terrorism, they oppose being terrorized. And they are quite willing to support Islamic terrorism as non-Muslims die.

The majority of Muslims don’t oppose Islamic terrorism. They don’t even view attacks like September 11 or Oct 7 as representing ‘terrorism’ until they end up on the wrong side of them.

Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine