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Excellent points.

The roots are deep and the view of history it takes to understand and comprehend (by an overview) is seldom taught. It takes initative and the youngsters of the last 30 years see little necessity to study history. Mores the pity.

We have, indeed, become soft and lazy in general. Many exceptions, of course; however sheer numbers are overwhelmingly on the side of 'its no big deal'. Sword rattling, nothing to get in a sweat about ... attitudes of the majority of Americans are prevasive. My opinion ... I pray I am mistaken. I do not believe so.

Thanks for offerring your perspective.

”…the blame game – the Turks, the Mongols, the imperialists, the Jews, the Americans – continues, and shows little sign of abating. For the governments, at once oppressive and ineffectual, that rule much of the Middle East, this game serves a useful, indeed an essential purpose – to explain the poverty that they have failed to alleviate and to justify the tyranny that they have intensified. In this way they seek to deflect the mounting anger of their unhappy subjects against other, outer targets….

If the people of the Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression…
-- Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?, Oxford University Press, 2002.

“The vast majority of all American Muslims subscribe to the strong Islamic tradition of tolerance and human dignity. Yet for one key reason, the extremists have disproportionate influence. One prominent cleric argued in 1999 that “because they are active they took over…more than 80 percent of the mosques that have been established in the U.S.” Although our pluralist ideals tend to view this statement as an automatic exaggeration, the reality is far more sobering. The vast majority of American mosques are funded with Saudi Arabian money, and most of the founders subscribe to the Saudi doctrine of Wahhabism, an eighteenth-century ideology of extreme purity that supports the spread of Islam through violence. Local imams can be appointed by anyone who chooses to fund and/or found a mosque; hence, the influence of this minority ideology is well entrenched among American clerics.”
Steven Emerson, American JihadFree Press, 2002.

This “e-mail” to Horowitz may seem a bit over the top, but if anyone doubts the threat of Islam, the two books quoted above will surely convince and disturb you. I was going to use the term “radical Islam,” but the more I read, the more I believe that all Muslims who hold a strict interpretation of the Q’uran, and who therefore come under the influence of the mosques described above, are a potential threat to America and to the free world.

I agree that we have become lazy as a nation, and want a “quick fix” for all that ails us, but there is no “quick fix,” we are in great peril, and time is not on our side.