Offensive Jihad (Arabic: جهاد الطلب‎, Jihād al-ṭalab), in contrast with defensive Jihad, is armed Jihad meant to expand the realm of Islam (Dar al Islam) at the expense of the House of War (Dar al-Harb). Although these world divisions were derived by jurists, they are not mentioned in the Qur'an and hadith. Offensive jihad requires the authorization and supervision of a legitimate Muslim leader.

Offensive jihad is the instrument to transform the Dar al-Harb into Dar al-Islam so as to achieve the ultimate aim of universalization of the Islamic faith and to establish its social order, Sharia law. This is seen by its advocates first as a collective duty but also an individual one. Since the goal can be accomplished by peaceful as well as by violent means, the participation could be fulfilled by the heart, the tongue, the hands, as well as the sword. Offensive jihad accordingly is a form of religious propaganda carried out by spiritual or material means.

Islamic scholars have differed on the issue of offensive jihad, to pursue non-Muslims in their own lands without any aggression on their part. Some scholars have even gone so far to say that it is illegitimate, while others say it is legitimate and even required. Most scholars agree that offensive jihad cannot be totally prohibited, since two schools of Islamic jurisprudence have ruled that offensive jihad is permissible in order to secure the borders of the Islamic lands, to spread the Islamic religion to people in cases where the governments do not allow it, and to remove every religion other than Islam from the Arabian peninsula.^{[unreliable source][verification needed]}

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden ( /oʊˈsɑːmə bɪn moʊˈhɑːmɨd bɪn əˈwɑːd bɪn ˈlɑːdən/; Arabic: أسامة بن محمد بن عوض بن لادن‎, ʾUsāmah bin Muḥammad bin ʿAwaḍ bin Lādin; March 10, 1957 – May 2, 2011), was the founder of Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets. He was a member of the wealthy Saudi bin Laden family, and an ethnic Yemeni Kindite.

Bin Laden was on the American Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) lists of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives and Most Wanted Terrorists for his involvement in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings. From 2001 to 2011, bin Laden was a major target of the War on Terror, with a US$25 million bounty by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On May 2, 2011, bin Laden was shot and killed inside a private residential compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by U.S. Navy SEALs and CIA operatives in a covert operation ordered by United States President Barack Obama.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.