Shockingly, the professor wrote this for Al Jazeera.

Edward Snowden’s jihad — Al Jazeera

Let us assume, for the moment, that National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is the person he’s portraying himself to be: not merely a patriot, but a humanitarian who’s given up all the trappings of a successful life to ensure that “the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant”.

The 29-year-old Snowden, who leaked information on secret US government surveillance programmes such as PRISM and “Boundless Informant” to the Guardian, is certainly right to focus on the danger posed by the Obama administration’s surveillance policies, and the “global war on terror” they serve, not merely to US democracy but to “the world” more broadly as well. The United States has been engaged in a jihad of global proportions not for the past ten years, but for well over a century. As with all empires, Islam’s included, the US jihad started small, but spread rapidly once the political and economic conditions in its core and peripheries came into proper alignment.

And as with other empires, the US jihads had their roots in the most offensive of ideologies, which justified its spread as both inevitable and good, while – not surprisingly – viewing any opposition as irrational, bad, and justly subject to suppression by any means necessary. As the 19th century Protestant preacher and arch-imperialist Josiah Strong put it, the emerging American empire was destined by God to rule the earth, everyone else must prepare for a “ready and pliant assimilation” or become “extinct”. Islam’s great conquerors tended to be a bit more generous, at least rhetorically.

Certainly, leaders in the US have always made sure to declare the best of intentions as they acquired each new territory, entrepot or sphere of influence, even as the colonised’s death toll from expanding, maintaining and defending the US empire climbed into the many millions. The lines between offensive and defensive jihad – the United States has, like most every country before it, long defined and defended its wars as defensive, divinely sanctioned and just – has always been conveniently blurred. “Converting non-believers,” whether by swords or napalm, is always inseparable from protecting the realm. […]

That Snowden has waged his jihad with the pen and tongue rather than the proverbial sword fits quite nicely into the modernist/liberal reading of jihad, and puts him squarely in the camp of the avant-garde of the Arab Spring, who refused to participate in a system they had come to realise was irredeemably broken. As he put it: “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.”

Here’s who wrote this drivel:

Mark LeVine is professor of Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine, and distinguished visiting professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden and the author of the forthcoming book about the revolutions in the Arab world, The Five Year Old Who Toppled a Pharaoh.