By far the sanest commentary on the whole Lou Dobbs/”Islamist” business is this bit from Demosthenes over at one of my recent blog discoveries, Shadow of the Hegemon:
The sad (and funny) thing is that the distinction Dobbs tried to make and failed is one that he never can, because it would beg questions of its own. What Dobbs was trying to say and would have said if he only could was that the war was against religious fundamentalism; that this was actually a conflict between secular tolerance and religious ignorance and intolerance. The problem, of course, is that we have religous extremists of our own, mouth breathing fundamentalists of our own; foul libellers of our own. They have power in our society, power that can’t be dismissed or ignored. How can Lou Dobbs say that the war is against fundamentalism when religious fundamentalists occupy places in the administration, seats in Congress, and many of the seats of power that can’t be ignored in Washington? He can’t, of course, so he can only try to split hairs and hope that nobody realizes that “they” aren’t so different from rather a lot of “us”; that the desire to “invade them, kill their leaders, and convert them all by the sword” is a more universal one than anybody wishes to admit. Lou Dobbs can never admit on television that the war is really against fundamentalism, full stop. This is far too fundamentalist a country to ever say that.