What's the difference between a "Muslim" and a "Jihadist"?

Once again, we revisit what will become the most important rhetorical question of the 21st century:

What's the difference between a "Muslim" and a "Jihadist"?

The momentous importance of this question may pivot in either direction: answered incorrectly, with devastating consequences for the eventual survival of Western civilization; or the correct answer, gaining more and more sociopolitical traction over the coming decades, and thereby possibly preventing the aforementioned cataclysm of a Mohammedan ruination of the Occident.

In previous essays, I've addressed this question:

Robert Spencer on the problem of Muslims

Are all Muslims jihadists?

The problem is not Muslims, but only 'jihadis'...?

I was reminded of this again by a Jihad Watch report, whose headline read:

"Convert to Islam who waged jihad for the Islamic State returns to Belgium"

It wasn't so much the headline, but the editorial remark by Robert Spencer that reminded me:

He should not have been allowed to return. He is an enemy combatant. The Islamic State has repeatedly vowed to conquer and subjugate Europe, including Belgium. As soon as Younes Delefortrie joined them, he should have been stripped of his Belgian citizenship.

Spencer can sound so tough and robust, because he's limiting his tough talk to a "jihadist".  The question that needs to be asked is, why does his tough prescription not apply to any and every Muslim in the West?  What makes any given Muslims in the West significantly different from this Belgian convert to Islam?  The fact that, ostensibly, they didn't join ISIS?  Somehow I doubt that any but the most nougaty-soft Jihad Watchers would tolerate such a view, that the problem is only ISIS, not Islam itself. 

Or is the crucial difference that garden-variety Muslims don't ostensibly "wage jihad" on a battlefield (whether literally in far-flung "bloody borders" throughout the Third World, such as Syria/Iraq, Nigeria, Sudan, the Af-Pak region, or the Philippines, or in a more paramilitary way, by running Infidels over in their car in various places in the West, and/or stabbing them, or shooting them, or exploding in one way or another)?  Again, I doubt that most even in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream would want to limit the deadly problem of Jihad to merely the front-line soldiers who perpetrate terror attacks.

So, on what rationale does one significantly distinguish this Belgian convert to Islam, and any given Muslim, such that we would robustly agree with our Fearless Leader, Robert Spencer, that citizenship should be stripped only of the former type, but not also of the latter type?

In yet another recent Jihad Watch report, we run up against the same thing (but of course, neither Spencer nor any of the commenters advert to the most important facet of it).  The headline reads:

"UK: Son of jihadi imam stripped of passport after waging jihad in Syria"

And yet again, like clockwork, Spencer writes:

This should be done with every last person who went to wage jihad in Syria or Iraq. Those jihad groups are at war with Britain. They are enemy combatants.

Again we ask: How do these Muslims who join the jihads du jour in, say, Syria, differ from any Muslim anywhere, whatsoever?  The weary person who has been educating himself on Islam for the past 15 years (at least) -- in great part illuminating himself on its growing horrors by learning from the growing mountain of data Robert Spencer himself has been amassing -- knows by now that the only difference is the superficially chatoyant mirage of false moderation and taqiyya deception. 

If the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, that small but growing nucleus of the West educating itself about Islam, doesn't engage this question head-on and discuss it openly, intelligently, and thoroughly, the West will never get around to readjusting its blithely perilous course, full steam ahead in its Titanic Ship of Fools, towards the Iceslamberg.