Andy McCarthy gets it right:
For the government and the media, it has long been an article of faith that we needn’t trouble ourselves with articles of faith … if the faith in question is Islam. The problem, we’re told — in defiance of reason and experience — is only these terrorist organizations, not their ideology. The organizations, of course, have never seen it that way. And they’re quite right: it has never been that way.
The majority of Muslims is not beholden to the various strains of jihadist ideology, especially at the juncture where word becomes deed. But the ideology indisputably springs from Islam. For that reason it has cachet and it has not been rejected out of hand even by the many faithful who regard it as an outdated, hyper-literal radicalism. And for that reason, a certain percentage of Muslims — hopefully at some point, an increasingly small percentage — will embrace it.
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My friend Bill Bennett likes to quote Hannah Arendt’s aphorism, “Nothing so inoculates a person against reality than the hold of ideology.” If we want to understand why we are at risk from cells in places like Cherry Hill which have no ties to known foreign terror groups, and if we want to learn what authentic, moderate Muslim reformers are up against, we need to open our eyes to what motivates jihadists. It is powerful, enduring and frightening because it is a doctrine, not an organization.