Hatred is a current ‘cool’ fad, but a terribly dangerous one. As with Holocaust deniers, evidence does not deter those Islamophobes who smear all Muslims. Since Muslims are roughly 1/5 of the world’s population, they would be wrecking massive worldwide havoc if their nefarious goal was domination and destruction of all non-Muslims. It clearly isn’t.

We are routinely presented with the image of an angry bearded man, possibly a clip from a video linked to Al-Qaeda, and then an unspecific warning of an imminent threat. We are asked to be concerned, but not allowed to be informed. The implicit equivalence of margin with radical and radical with violence makes for perpetual insecurity in modern societies.

Can al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorist groups be deterred? The Bush and Obama administrations both eventually concluded that they can be, according to a new book based on first hand accounts by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker.

What has begun as the “War on Terror” and is now a series of “overseas contingency operations” could in fact only go on in the global fashion that it did for almost ten years now because of the services provided by several hundred thousand contractors. In short, private contractors serve as enablers of this decade-old war, much like they have become enablers of most major Western militaries.

The unspeakable tragedy in Norway is a wakeup call about the dangers of right wing political and religious extremism and Islamophobia which threaten the democratic fabric of American and European societies. They create a social cancer whose metastasis impacts not only the safety and security of Muslims but also, as the attacks in Norway demonstrate, all citizens.