As discussed below, George Will is of the opinion that US policy has nothing at all to do with the rise of Islamic extremism. Given how hostile US policy has been to so much of the Muslim population of the Middle East (in other words, those who aren't claiming monarchial privileges over a swath of desert with oil under it), the obvious inference is that nothing we do could explain antipathy that spills over into violent hatred.

Encouraged by this, Cal Thomas vomits up yet another love letter to the ultimate right wing wet dream: The Clash Of Civilizations:



So what did this remarkably bias-free expert have to say?



Frankly, I don't know where the Islamic world gets the idea that Americans are out to crush them.

Are there real-world examples of how the Muslims are eagerly destroying American society? Of course:



Horrors. 29 banks who are marketing to Muslims. And there's a Sharia-compliant "Islamic Market Index" that Dow Jones publishes, which of course means that the Wall Street Journal is an al Qaeda mouthpiece. (And the number of spam e-mails I get advertising "Christian" services of one form or another suggest that Islam hasn't cornered the market on religion-specific business.)

After surveying this chilling evidence, Thomas advises us to stop being all tolerant and multicultural and wimpy and instead start kicking some Islamic ass:



Apparently, Cal has a following in England, where the citizens, having been whipped into an appropriate state of panic by code-crimson terror alerts, are taking their safety into their own hands:



Hooray for those brave Brits! Let those dirty, leather-wearing, Arabicish-talking brown people fly on some other plane. This one's for white people!

Somewhat more seriously, the Muslims certainly seem to have the spotlight in international terrorism these days. But twenty or thirty years ago, The Red Brigades and the IRA were hogging the headlines, yet I don't remember calls for mass action against Italians or the Irish. And even in more recent times, no one wanted to talk about the 2001 anthrax mailer once it seemed likely that he/she wasn't a Muslim. And Tim McVeigh? The right have convinced themselves that he was working for Saddam.

The more reasonable explanations are those that are less satisying for the rabidly xenophobic and paranoid -- the prevalance of Islamic terrorism says more about the conditions of much of the Islamic world than about the essential humanity of the 1.3 billion Muslims on the planet. Millions of Muslims are poor and desperate, and poor and desperate people are comparatively likely to do extreme things. Plus, Islam seems to especially emphasize obedience to clerical orders (like Catholicism at various points), so those looking to make a name for themselves could do worse than to whip their followers into a state of violence. (And, for the record, I'm not sure how anyone who claims to care about individual rights can be much of a fan of the ugly social regressiveness of nations under Sharia law. All to say, fundamentalist Islam is not something to be cheered by fans of human rights.)

But that's far different from claiming that Islam is an inherently violent religion. Christianity has plenty of blood on its hands (much of it Muslim blood), and plenty of Muslim and Christian residents of Beirut can attest that Jews are not pacifist. Christianity can easily spawn terrorism among the frightened and dispossessed (as seen in recent times by the Klan, the Christian Identity movement, Eric Rudolph, various neo-Nazi groups, and so on). India is well-acquainted with acts of terror from the Sikhs.

But none of this matters to those seeking to make the "war on terror" more about blowing up foreign people and foreign religions than about addressing larger questions about the sort of conditions that exist in Muslim countries and what priorities the US uses when responding to those conditions. It's far easier to dismiss a group as irredeemably violent (or, in Thomas' words, "see past [one's] natural reluctance to paint all members of a group with a broad brush") than to consider the context of the violence.

Even more telling, anyone advocating any response short of genocide is invariably derided as being "on the side of the terrorists." One doesn't have to support the views of Islam to recognize that terrorism is not a problem that can be solved by the application of ever-larger hammers. American bombs will not drive people into the arms of America -- they will drive people into the arms of whoever advocates the most violence against Americans. That seems self-evident, but also seems to sit in opposition to what we've seen happening in Iraq and Lebanon.

At least in Lebanon, Israel was using those American bombs to pummel a country with some relation to the terrorist threat they were facing. The same cannot be said of Iraq, as even President Bush acknowledged today:



And yet, of course, it's been shown time and time again that the US accepted the Iraq invasion largely on the false assumption that they were in some way responsible for 9/11, an assumption that was was easy to encourage by conflating Saddam and bin Laden as Muslims of a feather, or, in other words, "seeing past [one's] natural reluctance to paint all members of a group with a broad brush."

The question of whether Bush could have sold an invasion of a non-Muslim country in the aftermath of 9/11 was, as always, left unasked.