More thoughts on this topic, from Neoneocon:

…although in many respects Islam goes beyond what we think of as a religion, into the governmental and political (you can see some of the results in Iran), religion definitely has something to do with it. And if Islam did not call itself a religion, it would not be so difficult to rally support for fighting against jihadis, who present the added problem of masquerading as being followers of a regular religion rather than a murderous apocalyptic death cult.

Are all Muslims followers of a “murderous apocalyptic death cult”? No, but (a) they are followers of a religion that in its most fundamental form can easily become one, and often has; and (b) they are followers of a religion which, if adhered to at all strictly, is antithetical to our Western doctrines of liberty and human rights.

Yup.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ross Douthat: The Islamic Dilemma:

to any Muslim who takes the teachings of his faith seriously, it must seem that many Western ideas about how Islam ought to change just promise its eventual extinction.

This is clearly true of the idea, held by certain prominent atheists and some of my fellow conservatives and Christians, that the heart of Islam is necessarily illiberal — that because the faith was born in conquest and theocracy, it simply can’t accommodate itself to pluralism without a massive rupture, an apostasy in fact if not in name.

But it’s also true of the ideas of many secular liberal Westerners, who take a more benign view of Islam mostly because they assume that all religious ideas are arbitrary, that it doesn’t matter what Muhammad said or did because tomorrow’s Muslims can just reinterpret the Prophet’s life story and read the appropriate liberal values in.

The first idea basically offers a counsel of despair: Muslims simply cannot be at home in the liberal democratic West without becoming something else entirely: atheists, Christians, or at least post-Islamic.

The second idea seems kinder, but it arrives at a similar destination. Instead of a life-changing, obedience-demanding revelation of the Absolute, its modernized Islam would be Unitarianism with prayer rugs and Middle Eastern kitsch – one more sigil in the COEXIST bumper sticker, one more office in the multicultural student center, one more client group in the left-wing coalition.

The first idea assumes theology’s immutability; the second assumes its irrelevance. And both play into the hands of ISIS and Al Qaeda: The first by confirming their own clash-of-civilizations narrative, the second by making assimilation seem indistinguishable from the arid secularism that’s helped turn Europe into a prime jihadist recruiting ground.

The good news is that there is space between these two ideas. The bad news is that we in the West can’t seem to agree on what that space should be, or how Christianity and Judaism, let alone Islam, should fit into it.

The problem with the Left is that they don’t take religion seriously in general, so they can’t get their heads around this particular one, though it actually has some appeal to them as a potential ally against western liberal values and “imperialism.” So the multi-culties pretend or imagine that Islam is merely another quaint colorful cultural thing, with funny clothes and more prayers than most, and can’t conceive how antithetical it is to their own way of life.

[Update early afternoon]

Related: Angela Merkel is doing much more damage to the future of the West than Donald Trump:

Alas, there are two true things lying behind his idiotic policy suggestion. The first is that the problem is about Muslims. The second is that our “elected representatives” do not know what to do about it.

The above-mentioned Ayatollah Khomeini also said “Islam is politics”. He meant that Islam tells you how to rule, and therefore any unIslamic way of ruling is illegitimate. . . .

Such ideas have become powerful in the West, partly because of arithmetic: we now have a great many Muslims in our midst – far more here, proportionately, than in Mr Trump’s country, and more in France than here. The risk of violence rises with the total. Even if it is true that 99 per cent of Muslims would not hurt a fly, when you increase the numbers you inevitably get more of those who would. People are, therefore, right to worry more about mass immigration from, say, Syria, than from, say, Poland.

But, even with high numbers, the problem would be much less severe if our leaders and institutions had greater cultural confidence. If they upheld a robust belief in the Western way of life, reflected in what our schools taught, what the BBC broadcast, what rules of citizenship were insisted on, and what was considered injurious to our values, then the doctrines of Islamism would be better resisted.

But they remain willfully blind to the problem.

[Update a while later]

Speaking of willfully blind, the Merced knife attacker claimed to be an extreme Muslim, and had an ISIS flag, but the authorities still won’t call it terrorism.

But they want a president who will make ISIS afraid of us:

President Obama has seemed increasingly ill-suited to the recent shift in the public’s mood. He suggested at a press conference in Turkey that all his critics offer in the fight against ISIS is tough talk. What he seems to be missing is the majority of Americans who want not only tougher talk but tougher actions to follow. Instead, President Obama keeps offering a measured, slow-and-steady approach that many military experts and even supporters of his administration say is failing and insufficient.

It’s not just the President’s actions that don’t suit the current mood, it’s also his bloodless tone. It was noted by many observers that the only time he seemed truly upset when speaking about the bloodbath in Paris was when discussing Republicans. That’s a fight the President’s emotions seem to be engaged in, the one with ISIS terrorists is one he has been downplaying from the beginning.

Recall that two years ago the President was referring to ISIS as the JV team. And in a major address on ISIS last September he suggested ISIS was only an imminent threat to the region. More recently he claimed that threat was contained. The President always seems to be a day late and a dollar short when it comes to dealing with ISIS.

Going to have to wait at least a year for that, barring some Democrats in the Senate growing some testicles.

And then there’s this: Trumps plan may be dumb, but Obama’s laid-back do-nothing plan is even dumber. The most surprising thing about that one is the source.

…isn’t Donald Trump. He lives in the White House.

Yes.

Not Obama.

I suspect that Leon Panetta feels the same way. In fact, almost anyone involved in national security probably does.