DougR has a perspective that explicitly or not is shared by many Americans -- that the conflict between AL Qeda and the US is identical to the clash between militant Muslim jihadists everywhere and "Christianity" -- two huge waves of ill-informed madness locked in a death struggle.

This is a very dramatic picture, enough to rally the herds to battle stations. It reflects the deeply tragic capacity of humankind to go insane at the drop of a prophet.

It depends entirely on a complete failure of imagination on the part of all concerned, a willingness to deny communication and understanding to selected "other" groups, and the will to demonize humans with great alacrity.

The idiocy of it is just as ridiculous as the idiocy of the Inquisition, the babbling psychosis of the Third Reich, and the nuttiness of the Crusades. But millions of folks are being willingly sucked into this drooling nightmare of a world-view without even thinking twice about it.

In our most urgent historical crises, we have often found leaders who were capable of bridging the gap and bringing about some sort of progress by drawing people out of their dramatizations. In the present circumstance this seems a scarce likelihood, given that the leaders of most of those involved are promoting the insanity rather than seeking to cure it.

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