Sun Tzu advised thousands of years ago to know your enemy. If you do not acknowledge who your enemy is, you are well on the way to losing. Unfortunately, that is the current stance of our political and military leaders. They believe we are fighting some mysterious terrorist organizations who have hijacked a supposedly peaceful religion called Islam. They could not be more wrong. Perhaps part of the explanation for their ignorance is their lack of knowledge of history. For most of the period from the end of World War I through the Cold War, Islam was not a subject. Our leaders may have heard about the Barbary Pirates, but probably as romantic figures, not as the evils of Islam. But Thomas Jefferson and our Founding Fathers knew. Alexis de Tocqueville and Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt knew. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk knew and he condemned Islam as unfit for a progressive state and separated the mosque and state (but unfortunately the current government under Recep Tayyip Erdogan is re-Islamizing Turkey). But later in the 20th Century, the multiculturalists and the liberals imposed their politically correct ideas and pronounced that Islam was just another religion and should not be criticized. That is when most of the current leadership went to school and our schools failed to teach about the First Jihad when the Arabs swept out of Arabia and brutally conquered much of the then Christian and Hindu and Buddhist world and was only stopped in the West by Charles Martel (Charles the Hammer) at Tours in 732, or about the Second Jihad - the Ottoman Empire - which sprang out of Turkey and was only stopped by King Jan Sobieski at the gates of Vienna on 11 September 1683 (ironic date?). Since Ataturk abolished the caliphate in 1924, Islam just has not been on Western minds. But the Muslims were not asleep. The Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928, Saudi Arabia was created in the 1930s with a union of the Sauds and the radical Wahhabis which continues to this day. The fall of the Shah of Iran brought the brutal theocratic regime of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought the mujahedin, al Qaeda, and turmoil in the Middle East. However, the West still did not wake up. We are in total denial. We must first realize that Islam is not a religion as we think of religions. It is a totalitarian ideology with only a facade of religion. It is based on hatred and violence and never was peaceful and never will be. We must understand that the terrorist groups al Qaeda, HezbAllah, etc. are practicing "true Islam" and have not hijacked peaceful Islam. Their violent activities are what Islam directs them to do and that has not changed in 1,400 years. This ideology is a threat to the world and our naive thinking is a threat to the national security of the United States, as well as the rest of the Free World. In addition with our ignorance, we are putting the future of our children at risk. The world will never know peace until this ideology is declared a threat to the world and treated like fascism and communism. The more one studies Islam, the more disturbing it becomes. The world has suffered from history's greatest psychological warfare campaign over the past 1,400 years. The constant mantra that Islam is a religion of peace has been so ingrained that we even have presidents expounding it. Muslims themselves do not realize how thoroughly they have been brainwashed. This is a civilizational war and Islam is not compatible with civilization. The confrontation will come and if we delay too long, it will be catastrophic. We are facing an unending jihad - mujahedin versus kafirs (non-Muslims) - against civilization which drives to establish a single unified caliphate with no specific timetable, but with many coordinated and uncoordinated actions, all leading to the same goal, a world under sharia rule. We need to wake up and face this threat to the survival of Western civilization."