THE LEFT is in full swoon over . . . restaurant menus.

For well-meaning progressives, there is, of course, no war on terror. The "war"--at least this week's "war"--is on obesity. Thus, with barely contained glee, the New York Times reported on April 17 that a federal judge had upheld the regulation, promulgated by the Health Commissioner of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Nanny City, requiring all eateries to post a calorie-count for each menu offering.

Disgruntled restaurateurs had groused that they knew best how to serve their patrons, and that the patrons were adult enough to make their own choices. The Commissioner, though, would have none of it. He urged the court that this battle of the bulge was a crisis. In such straits, he declaimed, nothing is more crucial than information. Judge Richard J. Holwell agreed. Edified about their interests, it seemed to the jurist only natural that "consumers will use the information to select lower-calorie meals," and that "these choices will lead to a lower incidence of obesity."

Alas, information turns out to be crucial only in a manufactured crisis. When it comes to the real thing, like the jihadist threat to our lives and our way of life, we'd prefer not to know.

That is the clear message from our diplomatic progressives at Foggy Bottom. A week after Judge Holwell issued his calorie-count decision from the very courthouse that served throughout the nineties as frontline in what then passed for the war against jihadism, the Bush administration circulated guidance, long touted by the State Department and other pockets of Islamophilia, that would purge jihadism--the word, the very thought--from our public lexicon.

The Surgeon General believes smokers need a neon warning of the pluperfectly obvious. State, however, does not think jihadism is hazardous to your health. To the contrary, our top policy makers--the officials who regard Yasser Arafat's legacy, Fatah, as an indispensable partner for peace; who've just responded to the news that North Korea is helping Syria build nukes by . . . removing Kim Jong Il's terror regime from the perennial list of State Sponsors of Terrorism--have determined that jihad, like Islam itself, is a public good and therefore (try to follow this) we should just stop talking about it.

We Western non-Muslims, you see, must school the world's 1.4 billion adherents of Islam: The "real" jihad is an internal struggle for personal betterment, a key tenet of the Religion of Peace--or the "religion of love and peace," the iteration preferred by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the annual Iftaar dinner by which official Washington now marks the end of the "holy month of Ramadan." Besides, administration officials helpfully explained to the Associated Press, referring to a terrorist as a jihadist, an Islamo-fascist, or a mujahideen "may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates."

Of course, if jihad truly were a sublime summons to become a better person, it is not entirely clear how plowing jumbo jets into skyscrapers and mass-murdering civilians could achieve the sheen of the sacerdotal in the eyes of the faithful--droves of whom took to the streets in celebration of the 9/11 atrocities. Nor is it clear why calling a terrorist a jihadist would cause angst for "moderates" ... unless they are pretending that jihad is something other than what it is.

And they are. In so doing, moreover, they enjoy enormous support from special pleaders strategically dotted throughout government, to say nothing of their academy and media allies. Yet, as I've recently documented in Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books 2008), for all its energetic earnestness, the campaign to refurbish jihad (and to crush dissenters) is persuasive only in the ivory towers of elites desperate to be persuaded. Down here on Planet Earth, it is futile.

The Muslim world is not populated by Western intellectuals hard-wired to nuance white into black by legalistic arcana and historical massaging. In large swaths of the ummah, there is rampant illiteracy, education consists of myopic focus on the Qur'an, and intolerance (especially anti-Semitism) is so rudimentary a part of everyday life that any jihad rooted in "good works in society" would not conceivably comport with Western liberals' understanding of that term.

Progressive, moderate Muslims would doubtless like the concept of jihad to vanish. They are in a battle for authenticity with fundamentalists, and jihad would be far easier to omit than it is to explain away. Indeed, if anyone should resort to a purge of jihad, better it be Muslim reformers repealing the concept than U.S. Pollyannas striking the word. To persist in conceding jihad's centrality as an Islamic obligation while distorting its essence can only fatally damage the reformers' credibility and, hence, the entire reform effort.

Jihad, however, is very unlikely to go away. There are too many Muslims who believe in it, and there would be no Muslim world without it. When it comes to jihad, authenticity is simplicity, and, simply stated, jihad is and has always been about forcible conquest. As explicated by the West's pre-eminent scholar of Islam, Princeton's Bernard Lewis:

Conventionally translated "holy war" [jihad] has the literal meaning of striving, more specifically, in the Qur'anic phrase "striving in the path of God" (fi sabil Allah). Some Muslim theologians, particularly in more modern times, have interpreted the duty of "striving in the path of God" in a spiritual and moral sense. The overwhelming majority of early authorities, however, citing relevant passages in the Qur'an and in the tradition, discuss jihad in military terms.[1]

In fact, the erudite former Muslim of the nom de plume Ibn Warraq points out that even

[t]he celebrated Dictionary of Islam defines jihad as 'a religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad. It is an incumbent religious duty, established in the Quran and in the Traditions as a divine institution, enjoined specially for the purpose of advancing Islam and of repelling evil from Muslims.[2] (Continue Reading this Article)