Clash Of Civilizations

Mark Lynch's post at Foreign Policy on America's response to the Ft. Hood shootings is must read material. It reads in part (emphasis mine):

It's worth walking through the connection once again, because how America responds to Ft. Hood really is important in the wider attempt to change the nature of its engagement with Muslim publics across the world. Get the response right, as the administration thus far has done, and they show that things really have changed. Get it wrong, as its critics demand, and the world could tumble back down into the 'clash of civilizations' trap which al-Qaeda so dearly wants and which the improved American approach of the last couple of years has increasingly denied it.

The grand strategy of al-Qaeda and its affiliated ideologues is, and has always been, to generate a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West which does not currently exist. Their great challenge is that the vast majority of Muslims reject their theology, ideology, strategy and tactics. That's especially true of American Muslims. They therefore feel the need to change the environment in which Muslims live in order to change their calculations about the appropriateness of extremist identities and ideologies and actions.

Terrorism is a means towards that end. The object is to create a violent, polarized environment in which Muslims are forced to embrace a narrow, extreme version of Muslim identity. They want Muslims to accept a master narrative in which the Islamic umma is existentially threatened by Western aggression, and the only theologically and strategically appropriate individual response is to join the jihad in the path of god (as they have defined it).

And the fact of the matter is the neo-crazies play directly into Al-Qaeda's narrative by saying that all American Muslims are the enemy. That's what Al-Qaeda wants more than anything else, to see Muslims in the United States so marginalized, so hated and so demonized by their own fellow Americans that Al-Qaeda's hateful rhetoric makes sense. Their own best recruitment tool is the kind of bile spewed by the Wingnuts. They've done more for the cause of violent jihad than a hundred Bin Laden message tapes.

Do read the article, however.