Elan Journo on Our Appeasing Foreign Policy

Here's the opening of his article:

The murders of American diplomatic and military personnel in Libya underscore the consequences of America’s longstanding failure to uphold the rights of Americans to live and speak their minds in the face of the Islamist threat.

 For decades, U.S. policymakers have refused to recognize the religious character and goals of the Islamist movement. That movement—which encompasses Tehran’s mullahs, al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and many others—is a political ideology that seeks to subjugate all the world’s peoples, by physical force, under the supreme governing authority of Islamic religious law, in every area of life and thought.

America has for decades failed to see how that audacious long-term plan of conquest—however grandiose and fanciful it might seem—in fact actuates the Islamist cause. Whether the Libyan murderers and the mobs in Cairo and in Sanaa were truly incensed by a YouTube film or merely using that as a pretext, the Islamist goal remains to enforce submission in body and mind—on pain of death. The West’s long history of religious wars attests to the fact that until religion has been defanged and marginalized by reason, it is deadly.Our failure to understand this has crippled our policymaking.