From the Khomeini-led revolution in Iran to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait to the bombing of the World Trade Center, the American people have been subjected to relentless anti-Muslim indoctrination. It is imbibed with their mother's milk, stereotyped in their movies, spelled out in fifteen second soundbites on television; their daily paper offers them headlines that tell them all they need to know; politicians and Presidents sanctimoniously thrive on it.
The fiercely-held conviction inevitably produced by this insidious assault upon the intellect is that a great damnation has been unleashed upon the world, possibly by the devil himself, but in the form of people; people not motivated by the same needs, fears, emotions, and personal morality that govern others of the species, but people engaged in an extremely clever, monolithic, international conspiracy dedicated to taking over the world and enslaving it; for reasons not always clear perhaps, but evil needs no motivation save evil itself.
Moreover, any appearance or claim by these people to be rational human beings seeking a better kind of world or society is a sham, a cover-up to delude others, and proof only of their cleverness; the recent bombings which have taken place in Israel are forever proof of the bankruptcy of virtue and the evil intentions of these people in whichever country they may be found, under whatever name they may call themselves: and most important of all, the only choice open to anyone in the United States is between the American Way of Life and Islam's Way of Life, that nothing lies between or beyond these two ways of viewing the world.
This is how it looks to the simple folk of America. One finds that media pundits and establishment experts, when probed slightly beneath the surface of their academic language, see it exactly the same way. To the mind carefully brought to adulthood in the United States, the danger of Islam is self-evident; as self-evident as the flatness of the world once was to an earlier mind.
[Islam having replaced communism as the Evil Empire, we paraphrased this commentary on communism from "Killing Hope" by William Blum.]