What was the name of the person who said that the song was no tougher than a taped message from Al Queda?
"Jihad"—alongside fellow Christ Illusion album tracks "Eyes of the Insane" and "Cult"—was made available for streaming on June 26, 2006, via the Spanish website Rafabasa.com. The album was Slayer's ninth studio recording, and was released on August 8, 2006. During reviews "Jihad" received a mixed reception.
Blabbermouth's Don Kaye gave the opinion that "a handful of songs" on Christ Illusion "are either too generic or the arrangements are too clumsy to work well", and specifically singled out the track: "I'm looking at you, 'Jihad' and 'Skeleton Christ'." Ben Ratliff of New York Times remarked that the song is "predictably tough stuff, but let's put it on a scale. It is tougher, and less reasoned, than Martin Amis's recent short story 'The Last Days of Muhammad Atta.' It is no tougher than a taped message from Al Qaeda." Peter Atkinson of KNAC.com was equally unimpressed, describing the group's choice of song climax as:
..the same sort of detached, matter-of-fact tactic Hanneman and Araya have employed for "difficult" subjects in the past—Josef Mengele's Nazi atrocities in "Angel of Death" or Jeffrey Dahmer/Ed Gein's ghoulish proclivities in "213" and "Dead Skin Mask"—with great effect. But here it feels atypically crass and exploitative, as if it was done purely to get a rise out of people... And Slayer's usually a lot more clever than that.
Not all reviews were so negative. Thom Jurek of Allmusic observed that "the band begins to enter and twist and turn looking for a place to create a new rhythmic thrash that's the most insane deconstruction of four/four time on tape." The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov asked readers to "listen to the eerie, stop-start cadence of lunacy in 'Jihad,' with Araya playing the role of a suicide bomber almost too convincingly."King would have appointed "Jihad" as the group's nomination in the "Best Metal Performance" award category at the 49th Grammy Awards, deeming the chosen track "Eyes of the Insane" "the poorest representations" of the group on ninth studio album Christ Illusion. Despite King's statement, "Eyes of the Insane" won Slayer their first Grammy award. The Slayer guitarist has also stated; "I like playing 'Jihad' because I'm back changing my guitars, and Jeff starts it and he starts it quietly so you can hear the fans go crazy about it and you can't always hear that at the beginning of a song."
Ben Ratliff