As we’ve been saying here for a while, it’s completely irrelevant whether suspected plotters like the Fort Dix jihadis are card-carrying members of Al Qaeda International, Inc. Al Qaeda isn’t a formal organization, it’s an ideology—a philosophy of Islamic supremacism that is not limited to one group or country, but spreads through the medium of Islam.

I’d like to see mainstream media take one tenth of the energy and resources they’ve spent investigating US secret programs and put it into investigating where people like the Fort Dix Six learned and hardened the Islamic rationale for their plans. The New York Times has told us that the mosque they attended was a “moderate” mosque, and that’s as far as it’s going to get.

If the Times is right and they didn’t learn it at the mosque … then where? It’s a bit hard to believe that their indoctrination came entirely from the internet.

But US media are satisfied to let this remain a mystery.

The philosophy of jihad is the subject of VDH’s column for today: Al Qaedism, Again.

Why would Albanian-speaking Muslim refugees from the Balkans try to murder American soldiers? After all, the United States — not bin Laden’s rag-tag jihadists — saved Bosnia and Kosovo? And we did that by bombing the capital of a Christian European nation.

But then, why did a mixed-up Albanian Muslim in Salt Lake City, one Sulejman Talovic, go on a shopping-mall shooting spree? Five innocents were killed in the attack before the murderer himself was shot and killed.

And why, after pouring billions of dollars into Afghanistan, did poor, mixed-up Omeed Aziz Popal, an Afghan Muslim, try to run over several innocents in San Francisco near a Jewish center in September 2006?

Or, for that matter, why did an angry Muslim Pakistani gun down Jews in Seattle?

Or, again, why earlier last year, did a 22-year-old Iranian-American Muslim drive his sport utility vehicle into a crowded pedestrian zone at the University of North Carolina?