And for the snooty
A history of Islamic terror that manages to work in Descartes and Kant — from an academic and a researcher in the IHT:
The Prophet died a successful military leader who created a single Islamic polity that expanded - through warfare - all over the known world. The caliphate combined the double logic of a religious community and an imperial state.
This dual identity explains how Islam can be simultaneously peaceful and warlike. While the Koran enjoins that there shall be “no compulsion in religion,” Islam still regards it as a holy duty to extend militarily the borders of the House of Islam against the demonic world of unbelievers: “He who dies without having taken part in a campaign dies in a kind of unbelief.”
Coupled with this irreconcilability between Islam and its enemies is an extreme territorial sense of the sacred. Hence bin Laden’s principal demand for the departure of all infidels from holy Muslim lands. When extremists say they are killing in the name of Islam, they are in part appealing to Islamic traditions of long standing. Al Qaeda’s modern origins go back to Wahhabism, named after the revivalist movement founded by Muhammad Ibn’Abd al-Wahhab in 1744. Wahhab called for a return to a pure and unadulterated form of Islam closer to the ideals of the Prophet.
Faced with a decadent society, Wahhabism (not unlike some radical Protestant sects) reduced Islam to a scriptural literalism, an absolutism utterly hostile to other more medieval traditions. In this sense of direct rule by God, Wahhabism is a truly modern theology. Not unlike Descartes and Kant, it argues for the unmediated and total knowledge of its object.
Al Qaeda then blended this theology with fascism.
We also point you to Dr. Sanity (”I DON’T CARE ABOUT ISLAM except insofar that people of that faith want to destroy me, my family, my country and my way of life”) and Michelle Malkin.