[EnochPowellWasRight]

"You could have said the same thing, at some point, about Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, not to mention thousands and thousands of other Soviet/Communist dissidents (most nameless) during the Cold War."

The Soviet dictatorship didn't actually have the conceit that they were on a mission from Allah to support their cause. Your example fails, however, as Sakharov and Walesa were anti-Communists. Your "fifth column" would need to be made up of anti-Muslims....

"So why do you counsel the exact opposite strategy: lumping dissidents with our enemy, pretending they don't exist, and thereby making it easier for our enemy to marginalize and intimidate his own "fifth column"?"

That's the approach that will get more of us killed - waiting and hoping for this fifth column. Without a rewrite of the Koran, it's doomed to fail, anyway. We must confront the Islamic ideology squarely.

We confronted Communism squarely.

[Stultis]

Sakharov and Walesa were anti-Communists. Your "fifth column" would need to be made up of anti-Muslims....

Wrt the position of our enemy, anti-Islamists ARE "anti-Muslim," even if they claim to be Muslim. Our enemy's success depends on Islamism being accepted as mandatory and monolithic within their own cultural context at least (although such acceptance in the liberal West also helps them immensely). Again, why you would want to ENDORSE the truth of this key, and false, claim is something I can't understand.

BTW, Sakharov consistently focused his dissidence on issues of nuclear arms reduction, opposition to ballistic missile defense and human rights. He never openly denounced communism to my knowledge. It's not clear (at least to me) that he ever was specifically "anti-communist". It's enough that he was a dissident to the Soviet system.

Or should we not have supported his crusade unless he came out against communism specifically? Of course not. He hurt our enemy and confound his aims in any legitimate way that we can. We don't require dissidents to conform to some abstruse formula. It's enough that they dissent, in whatever fashion.