Over the course of all those interrogations, I concluded that “core Al Qaeda” wasn’t actually comprised of human beings, but rather it was an ideology with a particular version of Islam at its center. More than a religion, this ideology encompasses a political belief system, because its adherents want to rule things-whether it’s a village, a city, a region or an entire “caliphate.” And to achieve that goal, they are willing to use extreme violence. This is why Flynn, for example, has placed such importance on the words “radical Islam.” They are meant to indicate that many leaders of groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda are genuine ideologues, adherents to the fundamentalist Salafi strain of Islam. But he emphasized that Islam was not one of the clashing sides-that the terrorists had perverted the “peaceful teachings of Islam.” “Some call this evil Islamic radicalism,” he said in 2005. “Others militant jihadism. But he nevertheless claims that Obama has grossly underestimated the danger of jihadism. Where Obama sees a weak enemy that is getting weaker, his critics see a strong enemy that is getting stronger. Barack Obama has downgraded Bush’s War to a fight, and the enemy from Terror to specific terrorist groups.

America’s two post-9/11 presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, attempted a balancing act: combatting jihadist terrorism while seeking to avoid the impression that the Western and Muslim worlds were engaged in the kind of clash Lewis described. McFarland, in March. “But even if just 10 percent of 1 percent are radicalized, that’s a staggering 1.6 million people bent on destroying Western civilization and the values we hold dear. Where Obama sees a clash within Islamic civilization-between a tiny faction of fanatics and the vast majority of Muslims-his critics see a clash between Western civilization and a small yet significant segment of the Muslim world. Saudi Arabia, enraging Osama bin Laden-the historian Bernard Lewis sounded an alarm in The Atlantic about brewing anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. As the head of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon hosted a radio show featuring numerous guests who claimed that radical Muslim ideologues were clandestinely infiltrating the U.S. “We’re in a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people, most of them inspired by a totalitarian ideology: Radical Islam.

Radical Islam, Obama’s critics contend, is what it sounds like: radicalism rooted in the religion of Islam. Islam, his critics see an appalling lack of effort by the U.S. Where Obama sees “violent extremism,” his critics see militant religiosity. Where Obama sees a serious but manageable national-security threat, his critics see an ideological and civilizational challenge to the free world. In particular, we wish to bring Christians and Muslims together to proclaim to the world that religion must never be a reason for conflict, hatred and violence. Being one of the Five Pillars of Islam, zakat is an obligation upon all able Muslims. When a U.S. president uses “loose language that appears to pose a civilizational conflict between the West and Islam, or the modern world and Islam, then we make it harder, not easier, for our friends and allies and ordinary people to resist and push back against the worst impulses inside the Muslim world,” Obama told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Among the non-Christians, 9,400,000 or 6.5% of the population were Muslims (including Sunni Islam, Shia Islam, and a majority of unaffiliated Muslims), 1,700,000 or 1.2% were pagans (including Rodnovery, Assianism, and other religions) or Tengrists (Turco-Mongol Shamanic religions and new religions), 700,000 or 0.5% were Buddhists (mostly of the Tibetan schools), 140,000 or 0.1% were Hindus (including Krishnaites), and 140,000 were religious Jews.

The war is not confined to extremist Sunni Muslims or extremist Shia Muslims; the Islamic State and the Islamic Republic of Iran are seen as two sides of the same coin. “Not all the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are extremists or terrorists. If these leaders are thought of merely as violent nihilists to be bombed, those who are taken out will inevitably be replaced by other true believers, and the war will never end. Trump has gone further than many other Republican leaders in advancing the counterargument to Obama-not just in his proposed policies, like banning or severely restricting Muslim immigration to the United States, but also in his rhetoric. Living water is the story of me ruling the universe but not really because the bible is false and my living water is like a really stupid thing to talk about exactly because the bible is a dumb thing to believe in and my living water was also something like a delusion which is a dumb to like obsess with and even attempt to rule the universe.