From the Instapundit, Glenn learns why maybe blaming a particular sect or creed or any one type of a religion for actions taken by members of that religion doesn't work.:

APPARENTLY, I'M INSUFFICIENTLY PRO-WAR, according to a reader from, of all places, Canada:

Tell your readers why the following can't impact on your Bush-spin sotted brain: respect for freedom of conscience does not negate contempt for the unconscionable. Islam is the most perfected form of tyranny ever concocted. You have learned to write off people like me, who would turn Mecca and Medina and Qom and Karbala into charcoal. Why don't you focus your hate - and it really is Western self-loathing, in deference to Eastern savages - on the mortal enemy of our way of life?

Impartially, objectively and properly: you are a pathetic pollyanna, who is incapable of discerning pure evil. And you are in the way.

Sigh. This is a rather inaccurate and ahistorical view of Islam. As was noted here shortly after 9/11, many American mistake Wahhabism for Islam, when Wahhabism is in fact a rather out-of-the-mainstream variety. The Saudis would like to encourage that mistake, and Osama bin Laden hoped to provoke a major religious war (though I don't think he understood the likely outcome), but I'd prefer to see neither get their way.

UPDATE: Adding to my bemusement is this email from reader John Mendenhall:

Re your reader who accused you of being of an insufficiently discerning take on Islam and the threat Islam, as a polity, poses to Western life:

A very simple, if no particularly elegant, thought exercise will isslustrate what he means. If, say, renegade Lutherans were suddenly to take to the airways, blow up big buildings in Malaysia, behead Muslim hostages, sink (what--dhows owned by Muslim governments) with maximal casualties, blow up as many innoncent Muslims as they could get their hands on--

Would the Western response be to:

a: send them money
b: build them schools
c: march enthusiastically in the streets with each fresh atrocity
d: publish blood libels in the national press, or
e: stop them in their tracks right now right away first thing this afternoon whatever it took.

If you chose any answer but (e) the reader is right is assessing your dhimmitude. Though the reader didn't say so as well as others might have, the dhimmitude of Europe and its cousin the dhimmitude of American liberalism is the Chamberlainism of our time. Except there were not very many Nazis and there are billions of Muslims.

(I am married into a Minnesota family and am keenly aware that the words "renegade" and "Lutheran" don't work so well together these last five hundred years.)

But wouldn't what the reader above suggests be the equivalent of blowing up Pentecostals and Catholics for the actions of those Lutherans?

Hello, the people who read you can't tell the difference between one group and another.  That's why we should not be focusing on the Islamic aspect of the terrorists but the terrorist aspect.  Literally it does not really matter if they are Islamic or Bahai.  They are terrorists, the same as Timothy McVeigh.  And as long as you emphasize the fact they are Islamic, you will never beat them because they will call on their co-religionists to protect them.  That's why we're losing the war.