As a child of the Cold War with the Soviets as America’s enemy, when the wall came down and the threat of Communism faded, I was under the illusion that the world had inexorably turned a corner and that history was on the march to bring freedom, capitalism, and prosperity to the whole world...

The events of September 11 exposed that illusion for what it really was: a delusion. There were actually people out there who wanted to start a war with the United States.

With 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Islam went from an almost nonexistent issue for most Americans to front and center. Suddenly, Islam and Muslims are in the news on a daily basis, doing unspeakable things to one another and others.

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Knowing nothing of this threat and wanting to know more, I picked up books like Dore Gold’s Hatred’s Kingdom and Benny Morris’ Righteous Victims, and even a copy of the Koran, which, honestly, I couldn’t get through. And I read a lot more online from guys like Steve Emerson, Robert Spencer, and David Horowitz.

Over the following years, you had everything from the Shoe Bomber to the Ft. Hood shooter to the San Bernardino attack and countless others. And elsewhere in the West, you had everything from the murder of Theo Van Gogh to the London 7/7 attacks, the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and others. It seemed like Islam was at war against the entire world.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the news, despite everything we were seeing with our own eyes, the blood, the carnage, the innocent victims, we were told that Islam wasn’t the problem. Instead, the problem was the individual terrorists who just happened to be Muslim. “Islam isn’t violent,” we were told, despite the fact that most of the wars going on in the world involve Muslims, and the

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