Off our streets Muslim bombers!
Here is the problem as I see it and Dent and anyone else educated on the matter of Islam and the West (which is the umbrealla issue here).
On the Regressive Left you have Liberals who feel bad about the hatred the Muslim world received after 9/11, so they intellectually attack anyone who points to Islam as being any sort of major influencing factor to these attacks (which it absolutely is).
On the other side of the pole, constant news of Islamic terrorist threats killing many innocent people is doing exactly what these terrorists intend to do; terrorize people. Because of the generally fearful defensive nature of Conservatives throughout the world, they are very susceptible to this kind of psychological warfare and react predictably.
Make no mistake, this is a war of language.
And also information but given that language is the medium of information I stand by my statement. In general the US education system is not very nuanced in it's approach to world issues (See: pro-war propaganda, Red Threat, Middle East) and so many in America are not familiar with the tremendous amount of intellectual and psychological nuance this whole issue brings into an account.
I would honestly say at a MINIMUM, unless a person has spent some basic time trying to understand Islam from an open-minded and culturally interested point of view, as well as having a working history of the territorial and ideological battles between Christianity and Islam over the past 14-1500 years, their chance of possessing anything but a very superficial (and insufficient) understanding of how this clusterfuck of the Middle East and Islamic Terrorism came to be.
Then the solution is the educate as many people in the world as possible and urge them into a secular, evidence-based democratic (or better) society where they can still have private spiritual beliefs but will be separated from the tribe mentality of organized religion. This task is monumental.
I would recommend anyone seriously interested in this issue to read this book.
http://www.popeye-x.com/downloads/ot...d.of.Faith.pdf