I believe the main driver of jihad is the fear Muslim men have of women with real freedom and power. Hatred of the West is about impotence—the impotence Muslim men feel as they watch the world pull ahead of them. Their masculinity—their alpha status—is threatened. And nothing worries them more than women who are not under their thumbs.

On July 2, 09 the New York Times ran a story that had this:

Last week, a crowd of men, the heads of households uprooted from Swat, gathered in this village in northwestern Pakistan for handouts for their desperate families. But before they could even get a can of cooking oil, the aid director for a staunchly anti-Western Islamic charity took full advantage of having a captive audience, exhorting the men to jihad.
“The Western organizations have spent millions and billions on family planning to destroy the Muslim family system,” said the aid director, Mehmood ul-Hassan, who represented Al Khidmat, a powerful charity of the strongly anti-American political party Jamaat-e-Islami.
The Western effort had failed, he said, but Pakistanis should show their strength by joining the fight against the infidels.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/world/asia/02aid.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=in...

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The next day a story in the Times came out that detailed an election in Indonesia in which head coverings for women had become an issue. Indonesia is predominately Muslim and the opposition was accusing the incumbent of being a crappy candidate because his wife, GASP, walked around without her head covered. The opposition candidates ordered their wives—cameras in tow—on a shopping excursion to buy hijabs or jilbabs as they are called there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/03/world/asia/03jilbab.html?scp=1&sq=a%20...

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This past Sunday former president Jimmy Carter penned an op/ed on the ills of religion for women. In it he said:

This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. It is widespread. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths.

More:
In some Islamic nations, women are restricted in their movements, punished for permitting the exposure of an arm or ankle, deprived of education, prohibited from driving a car or competing with men for a job.

I recommend reading the whole:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/12/jimmy-carter-womens-...

Then there is this from a Human Rights Service worker in Oslo, who shows exactly how women end up “choosing” the hijab—that is they are inculcated from grade-school onward that females should cover their heads. I know the Obot so-called feminists like to say the hijab and the burqa are choices, but of course, that is to simplify a very complex indoctrination to the point of being ludicrous. That plays right into the hands of the very men who want women to be marked as less than free, to remain subservient humans.

Finally, on my desk is a clipped quote from Robert McNamara.

“War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. We kill people unnecessarily.”

I have penned beneath this quote one of my own:

“Sexism is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. We kill women unnecessarily.”

Sub in the word sexism for war and you have the truth about the female condition on this planet. It is not so simple as racism, because every race has its own ability to inflict a brand of sexism on the women in that culture. And women are needed for humans to continue so sexism must be sold more palatably to women—so they open their mouths and take it like a baby robin takes a worm from its mother.
Femicide comes in FAR more flavors than war deaths. Femicide kills even when it doesn’t and even those who one thinks of as friends are SO often foes to women. Femicide is stamped into the female condition in many indelible ways, primary among them religion and the culture religion breeds—cultures from which women have no real means of escape. No treaty will abolish femicide deaths, no cease fire lessens the burdens of misogyny. Least you think this is just a factor of, say, Sub-Saharan Africa –tune in to Keith Olbermann here in the misogynistic US of A. Look up the stats on rape in this country. Domestic violence, for good measure.

And as I think about religion and women, I am pleased that, belatedly, VERY belatedly, Mr. Carter has gained some understanding. But the truth is Mr. Carter had the understanding all along. He just opted to not look it in the face. Men rarely get over their sexist viewpoints when their sexuality runs high, when impotence is a greatest risk. As they age, as they are less and less fearful of dominate females, men lighten up.

Mr. Carter could not bring himself to support Hillary and that shows his words are not matching his deeds. He invested male hope in a male who was not ready and is not ready for this job; Carter shunned a woman who clearly was. Our culture has no role models for Mr. Carter and he was not smart enough or brave enough to see past the binders of the sexist culture he lives in.
Of course that brings us to the man Mr. Carter heartily supported: Barack Hussein Obama.

Mr. Obama, for his part, craftily played on Muslim men’s fears of being dominated by women who can let the wind blow through their hair without ending up ostracized from the community or worse. He essentially promised Muslim men, if they wouldn’t fly planes into our buildings we’d look the other way on human rights violations to their women. What’s a little forced hijab between frat bozy, after all.

As Mr. Carter objects to the religious ties that bind women, the man who he supported to POTUS is busy assuring Muslim men that the West wants only a Potemkin village of freedom for women. School them, but cage them. Palin winked at us literally, but Mr. Obama’s wink and a nod to Muslim men is a vicious and deadly wink.