Lastly, here are links to two previous posts I made, both quoting my friend Tim Clancy, who is very knowledgeable about world politics and history, much more so than I am.

Here's his discussion on the specific nature of the threat: http://dexeron.livejournal.com/581616.html

And here's his discussion on what some Muslims are doing to fight the threat: http://dexeron.livejournal.com/581675.html


EDIT: I really need to quote something from that first link, because even if you disagree with everything I said above, this is a good practical reason of why not to simply say "Islam is the enemy:" it's simply impractical. To quote Clancy again:

"(1) Every *legitimate* problem solving method in the world seeks to reduce the scope of the problem by separating wheat from chaff, signal from noise. Almost every form of analysis is an attempt to isolate further, what is the root cause activity that is driving the negative behavior. Because once you find that smallest part...you can focus on it, put all your attention into that part and not defuse any effort by spreading it thin on the uninvolved.

It's a form of logic - given group A and group B, and group B is the root cause of behavior C - no matter how much effort you spend working to modify group A, you will not change group B and therefore not improve behavior C.

Everything bad you could say about Salafist-Takfiri I would accept and add a few more.

This very small subset of all Muslims is punching far above its weight and are a true manifestation of evil on this planet. So why waste our time and resources on the other 1.49B Muslims who *aren't* Salafist Takfiri? This is not about political correctness, this is about utility in target selection.

(2) I call this fractal segmentation and it's based off of statistical self similarity of fractional units, or more easily called "the coastline of britain problem". Stated simply as you increase the fidelity of your measure, and are able to read in ever smaller units of measurement, the figure you are studying literally changes in its shape,dimensions and measurement. The thought experiment which demonstrates this is if you imagine measuring the Coastline of Britain with a 200km stick, it will be one shape and have a distance of 2400km. But if you measure the Coastline of Britain with a 50km stick, it will have a very different shape, and a coastline distance of 3400km.

When someone says "Muslims are the problem" their 'stick' is 1.4B people large. The Salafist Takfiri measurement 'stick' is maybe a few million. The shape and nature of the problem generalists describe is very different than the actual shape and nature of the actual problem. The generalists rough blob of a measure is like looking at a 10,000 piece puzzle after you've spent the night in a mexican bar drinking the worm - it's fuzzy, hard to describe and not easy to work on. The Salafist Takfiri measurement is like picking up a single piece of the puzzle, with clarity, and saying "this...this is what we need to focus on."

In professional (private sector) analytics, the segmentation goes down to micro clusters of 10,000 people and in some cases gets down to the "protocol of one", measuring a problem a single individual at a time. This is fairly new because the computing and instrumentation power to do this simply wasn't available in the past."