After listening to an excellent talk on terrorism by a former Pentagon official whom I will not name here, I found his e-mail address and asked his opinion of my recent article on the West's failure to confront and counter Islamist ideology. His reply was extensive and substantive. "In military academies, they teach the so-called DIME model, that is that every strategy has a diplomatic, informational, military, and economic component. Countering ideology is 'informational,' and yet it is the one component at which the United States is worse at," he observed. When I pushed further, he gave this assessment of the Western press: "Today, we have Islamists, anti-Islamists, and I would argue that the press are largely anti-anti-Islamists in their motivations on the subject."

This makes a lot of sense. The high-brow snobs that occupy offices at The New York Times and suchlike see Islamists as fanatics, and anti-Islamists as bigots, each being equally disgusting. Hence, the so-called "elites" that inhabit the mainstream media don't want their publications to serve as a platform for either. They would rather stay above the ideological fray in aloof high-mindedness. That they do not "offend" anyone in staying silent, is an added bonus.

Except that this is sticking one's head in the sand, rather than being high-minded. Islamist terrorism is a symptom of a mental disease that is Islamism, and the refusal to examine what goes on in an Islamist's mind and explain its errors, is an abandonment of any possibility of ending that kind of terrorism for good. Contrary to the high-brow view, anti-Islamists may be motivated not by the blind hate of Islam, but by something else: by understanding that Islamists process Islam wrongly -- they treat it as the truth, rather than as a mere cultural tradition, the truth value of which is not only unknown, but is unknowable.

Being a disgusted "anti-anti-Islamist" is, therefore, not a sound position to take. Only the clear-eyed critical analysis of Islamist thinking -- or of whatever mental processes that, to an Islamist, pass for "thinking", and the public discussion of the fallacies of Islamist reasoning and logic can cure the world from the curse of Islamist terrorism. Academia and the press should be two key participants in that effort, yet they don't want to get involved.