That's what I said in the OP. Jihad apology is the effect of trutherism, not its underlying cause.
To believe otherwise is to believe truthers are in complete agreement with the jihadist world view and are working, covertly or overtly, to support it . In which case they would be saying, yes, we were attacked on 9/11 by terrorists and we deserved to be attacked because of our policies and actions in the Muslim world.
I don't have any quotes (sorry) but I would be in agreement with your point. People who consciously pursue this will rather say that America brought it on itself. Islamists terrorists merely gave the USA a taste of its own medecine, and such.
However the 9/11 CT crowd is large, and my opinion is that many people have not gone all the way down the rabbit hole, esp. on the LIHOP side. They may just believe in tidbits of it. Generally this means that they suppose a certain level of dishonesty and corruption from the USA. While it does downplay the danger of the jihadists (if we LIHOP, that mean it could have been stopped), it does not deny them their role, and it actually reinforce that the USA is a morally corrupt force that will stop at nothing and thus deserve it anyway.
If you would please allow me to go even more general, the logical conclusion -which is sometimes called upon but never materialized (...yet), or that some will not admit to- of a lot of the CT stuff would actually be civil war or terrorism. I know that in America, CT are sometimes embedded with apocalyptic and religious tones.
That does not make them jihad apologists, but you do find apologists for violence that could be construed as terrorism, sometimes dubbed with extremist religious motives. So maybe there's something there... a certain familiarity?
Another thing I might have missed, but maybe a small comparison could be useful, is holocaust denial. As we all know holocaust denial cannot go without nazi apologists.
However there's a difference: they deny the crime, thus of course that means that the Nazis were not criminals.
In the case of the 9/11, no one denies the crime. And despite what I mentioned earlier about LIHOP and MIHOP, the identity of the criminal seems to be of lesser importance to the 9/11 Truthers. Of course you will find a lot of people with an ideological slant and their pet conspirators, some only interested in 911 as another crime to add on the list of whoever "The Man" is in their view, but the real meat of the 9/11 Truth movement is how the crime was done: Thermite or CD, planes or no planes, North or South of CITGO, freefall and/or in its own footprint, softened or melted steel... I am amazed at the energy they will deploy to (badly) explore very narrow technical details. This is what defines the 9/11 Truth, this is how we break them down in categories. The exact identity of the culprits and their motive is of a lesser importance, anything big and ominous can fit.
TL;DR version: I provide no quotes and have honestly no idea if 911 truth is an apology for Jihad.
