Radical Islam is worth worrying about

[Daniel Pipes said] "Islamists have nothing like the military machine the Axis deployed in World War II, nor the Soviet Union during the Cold War. What do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or the Gulag?" A thoughtful answer to that question is sobering. The Islamists have:

• A potential Access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.
• A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.
• An impressively conceptualized, funded and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill and electoral success.
• An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, form illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians."

Add to the above "a huge number of committed cadres. If Islamists constitute 10 percent to 15 percent of the Muslim population worldwide,they number some 125 million to 200 million persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, who ever lived."

-- William F. Buckley, quoting Norman Podhoretz, townhall.com, 9/6/07