"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen [jihadi fighters] to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qa'ida" in order to make generals race there, and we cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses – without their achieving anything of note!"
Now, Johann Hari is doing what he's rather good at, which is making a intelligent point which should really have been blindingly obvious, while making a very common and very, very stupid mistake. 'Jihadi' is, of course, a made-up idiot-word for halfwits and literally means "bloke from Jihadland". Arabs say 'mujahid'/'مجاهد' and, once they've got enough to play piggy-in-the-middle, they stick -een/ين- on the end. English speakers should know the word 'mujahideen'/'مجاهدين' if they know anything about Afghanistan, and this is Indie readers we're talking here.
So why this daft neologism 'jihadi'? I'm guessing it's some kind of unspeaky thing where the 'Jihadis' are our enemies and the 'Mujahideen' our friends, or at the very least we wanted a word for them that wouldn't recall a historic relationship we'd all rather pretend didn't happen. But that's not even what baffles me. What baffles me, baffles the absolute living daylights out of me, is why did he feel it necessary to translate it for us? Something must be seriously flawed with our perception of the Muslim world if we have to explain real Arabic words used by Arabs and Arabic speakers using stupid Arabic words invented by cretinous English speakers.
Edit: put the proper Arabic squiggles in.
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