The Wahhabi / Khomeinist Islamic Threat and Meaningless Words

It is axiomatic that if you can't diagnose a problem or an illness, than you can't cure it. Thus, when you here Obama call the threat the West faces "violent extremimism," you can rest assured, the threat we face will never die. But the vast majority of those who criticize Obama are little better. Typical is the column in The Atlantic today by Peter Beinart calling for the threat to be labeled "violent Islamic extremists." That is a better, but still nowhere near specific enough to allow for the problem to be dealt with at its core. Like sharks, there are many different schools of Islam, only a few of which pose an aggressive danger to civilization, at least at the moment. Why is that? When our government answers that question, when they put the threat of "violent extremism" in that context, then and only then it can be dealt with effectively by encouraging, through opinion and, if necessary, physical means, the Muslim world to deal with the specifics of their faith that are at odds with civilization.

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