It's a big one.

In the Emerson article you site, he provides some very persuasive details about the activities of radical Islamist groups, which receive support from fundamentalist (and maybe even mainstream) Muslim organizations and congregations. However, Hamas and FIS are not religious organizations. They are political organizations with a religious (and I use that word in its broadest possible interpretation, for they are surely not Godly) focus.

The questions I have:

Do all the organizations who fund terrorist groups do so knowingly? That is, is a group within the organization siphoning off some of the money (collected for legitimate reasons) to send to terrorist organizations? I think of Americans who have sent money to, say, support political action groups supporting Catholic rights in Northern Ireland because of their Irish heritage, and who have unwittingly supported IRA terror without so intending. You asked once about exposure. Exposure becomes very important here.

Are "fundamentalist" and "radical" really equivalent, or is radical a subset of fundamentalist? Is every woman who wears a burka or a headcovering automatically a terrorist? Is every man who goes to a conservative mosque a bomber? Can one hold extremely conservative religious beliefs without being a political radical?

The radicals are the threat.

Can we differentiate them from the fundamentalists? Is there a difference?

I suspect there is. Not every evangelical Christian bombs Planned Parenthood.

Can we find a way to isolate the radicals by recognizing fundamentalists as conservative and giving them a way to differentiate themselves? As it is now, by confusing the two, we make it more difficult for fundamentalists to speak up and align themselves with people who are calling them names, like "terrorist" and "murderer".

Think about how difficult it would be for you, as a conservative, to criticize the President on a Democratic BBS, or at a party overwhelmingly attended by liberals. Now multiply that by 100, put your eternal soul's ultimate fate into the mix, and think about your adversaries accusing you not just of bad politics, but of capital crimes. If you yourself, and all your friends, are not guilty, would that make you likely to say, "Yes, you're right, we have done bad things"?

The Muslim communities must find their own way to speak up on this issue. They have been criticized for not doing so, by Christians, Jews, and others. If we continue to script the discussion in this way, fundamentalist groups who might wish not to be associated with terror will see themselves, and will be seen, as collaborators knuckling under to Western pressure, not as independent thinkers standing up for the values of their own religion.

We really do need to shut up about Muslims and to focus on the criminal activities of radicals with Islamist agendas. We don't understand much about Muslim beliefs anyway.

Come to that, I wonder how many of us understand Christianity all that well.