Note from Robert Spencer:
In the Arabic-language Al-Wasat magazine, a revealing interview with a jihadist. From the SITE Institute, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

By elevating Bin Laden's importance, and expending so much effort on locating him, one is helping to aid the Jihad. For now, when he is captured or killed, it will make not the slightest difference; the tenets of Islam still exist; al-Jazeera still exists; the audiotapes and videotapes, based on Qur'an and hadith, still exist.

And by focusing on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the American government is unintentionally helping to delay recognition that the threat comes not from one group, but from hundreds of groups, or from no group at all -- just a Muslim who, whatever his grievance, because he has a prepared prism (Islam) through which to view the universe, will take out that grievance on the Infidels, in one way or another.

The American government needs to find a cadre of people who understand what Islam is all about, are unafraid to identify it, and not "a handful of extremists" as the permanent threat, to identify as well all the instruments of Jihad, including those that do not involve "terrorism" and are, in the end, because less spectacular, far more dangerous.

It is infuriating to see how the Western world is behaving. It is not only the appeasers, and the sauve-qui-peut philosophers of Europe, who cannot admit to their own populations the folly of what they have permitted (the millions of Muslim immigrants, which are now a permanent threat unless mass expulsions are undertaken, and that can only happen if the intellectual ground is prepared), nor the sheer idiocy of the Euro-Arab Dialogue which has become, essentially, a vehicle for the appeasement of Arab demands, and for the adoption of Arab attitudes in the Jihad against Israel -- perhaps in order to buy time (it will do the opposite), perhaps in the dreamy hope that somehow, Islamic tenets cannot possibly be what all those Cassandras on places like Jihadwatch say they are, but really if only we placate them by throwing Israel to the wolves (and that becomes easier if all of your media has for decades, and with ever-greater meretriciousness, been engaged in misreporting events involving Israel so that, little by little, drop by deadly drop, the stillicide of vilification manages to carve out its little depression, in which there now lies a pool of fetid hate.

Less attention to Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawihiri, doing their imitation of Muhammad and the best of his Companions somewhere in Waziristan, and much more to rallying those in Western Europe who are desperate for transatlantic moral, intellectual, and even financial support -- akin to that received by anti-Communists in western Europe after World War II -- is far more important.

Osama Bin Ladens are if not a dime a dozen, at least easily replaceable. Pooh-pooh his importance, diminish his place in history. There are plenty of Bin Ladens, and there always will be. The trick is to make sure that no Muslim polity, state or group, has any major weaponry, and to identify ways to put such pressure on Muslim states that, whatever their secret and eternal sympathies, they will no longer fund mosques and madrasas, no longer take the risk of engaging in Jihad --it is simply a question of reading them the riot act, and doing everything possible to make the world of Islam recognize the failures -- political, economic, intellectual, and moral -- of Islam. It can be done. It is not beyond the wit of Infidel man.

Look to the roots of the problem -- roots which cannot be exitrpated, but can constantly be cut back, again and again and again, while the perception of the precise threat of Islam is explained to enough innocent Infidels, and the precise failures of Islam are demonstrated (but not explained) to a sufficient number of intelligent Muslims who may feel keenly their being cut off from the West, its educational possibilities, its health care, all the sheer wonderfulness of it that they both love and hate, without being able to reconcile the two. Well, as long as "hate" is in the equation, and there is no open recognition and admission of what Islam teaches, those Muslims will have to suffer as well -- forced to endure the sole society of the True Believers, until such time as they, those Muslims, act in the Ataturkian model. We cannot change Islamic doctrines. No one can. But the practice can be so tied down, roped in, constrained that it will, little by little, lose adherents and loyalties.

And the Special-Formula Roundup that Ataturk concocted to tend, and cause to flourish, his Turkish Kemalist garden (think tulips, and turbans, and the bulbuls of Gulistan) -- well, you can still pick up a large bottle of the stuff right here, at this website. No charge for shipping and handling.

Get with the program, Pentagon, will you?