Hasan: OK, you’re not saying the religion of Islam is a political ideology? “It’s not enough to deny responsibility, saying one’s own interpretation doesn’t support terrorism. “There is a battle of interpretation within Islam,” he’s said. Asked if he was referring to “radical Islam,” he responded, “It’s radical, but it’s very hard to define. We ought to do that, but it’s not just ISIS either: al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda. 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. Whether this is more plausible than the subject’s soul floating out of their body is a matter of personal opinion. Pompeo, an evangelical Christian, has argued that more Muslim leaders need to speak out against terrorism in the name of Islam, noting that Protestant leaders have condemned the hateful actions of the Westboro Baptist Church in his state.

Mike Pompeo, the Kansas congressman who Trump has tapped as his CIA director, has described the clash in more nuanced terms, stressing that Islam should not be equated with extremism. 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. 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. 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 we are not permitted to speak or write those two words, which is potentially fatal to our culture,” writes Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick for national-security adviser, in a book he published this summer with the conservative writer Michael Ledeen. Traditional U.S. alliances are liable to be reshuffled as well. Islam, his critics see an appalling lack of effort by the U.S.

Where Obama sees a serious but manageable national-security threat, his critics see an ideological and civilizational challenge to the free world. “We’re in a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people, most of them inspired by a totalitarian ideology: Radical Islam. The fascists wanted to control the world. But our forefathers didn’t do it either. Fleischer. The population eventually rebounded to 400,000-500,000 people by the next century, he says.’ Suleiman’s forefathers had done most of the heavy lifting of reconstructing Constantinople by ordering the creation of mosques, universities and hospitals. Jerusalem in 1080 were modelling their idea on the Muslim hospitals they had seen. Liberal forms of modern Judaism, like modern liberal Christianity, sit lightly on the idea of the resurrection of the body and emphasise spiritual life immediately after death. The ideological frame also invites a response that goes well beyond military tactics like drone warfare and air strikes, which Flynn argues Obama has relied on too heavily.

Flynn disagreed. “There was a cost, post-World War II, called the Marshall Plan for Europe,” he said. Einstein proposed that light is composed of separate packets of energy, called — quanta or photons — that have some properties of particles and some properties of waves. They have to speak English first. The film was lambasted by the North Korean media and the film was delayed at first. An atheist could argue that we could very much have come up with much of the same philosophy without any reference to gods that probably do not exist in the first place. The religious nature of that threat makes it very hard for Americans to come to grips with. Several members of Trump’s emerging team have described the threat in similarly stark and broad ways. But we have not yet exhausted the discussion of the moral temper required for the pursuit of truth.