One of the reasons so few conservatives have confidence in Attorney General Eric Holder's judgment is that, though he had no trouble calling white America a nation of cowards and the Bush administration a bunch of war criminals, he just can't bring himself to say that Muslim terrorists are radical Islamic extremists, or even acknowledge that the phrase is meaningful:
It really shouldn't be hard to attribute acts of terror by people like the Times Square bomber, the Christmas bomber, or the Fort Hood shooter to Islamic extremism, a term which seems to some Americans to be a redundancy.
Islamists, i.e. the millions of Muslims who embrace or support militant jihad, see themselves as engaged in a holy war against religious infidelity. The Koran encourages them to kill those who refuse to accept the teachings of the Prophet, especially the Jews and whoever supports the Jews. Those who in the 1990s attacked the World Trade Towers, the U.S.S. Cole, and the Khobar Towers, those who hijacked the planes on 9/11, and all those who have come after, share one thing in common - they believe they're doing the will of Allah. They are radical Islamists. Holder's reluctance to admit this is deeply troubling, especially since he leaves us with only a narrow range of possible explanations for his demurral:
He's either very naive, very uninformed, very dumb, or, most troubling of all, very reluctant to impugn people with whom he feels a measure of sympathy. Whichever of these is the case, it's not good.
RLC