In fact, fundamentalist leaders often have professional backgrounds.

For example, the fanatical Red Guard movement swallowed up almost every youth of the right age.

Conservatives, for their part, think of Liberals as combining sanctimoniousness with hard ball electoral tactics.

For many, the incident was an opportunity to complain about dwindling rights in the ultra religious kingdom.

It is a fantasy to believe that peace can be concluded without the radicals participation.

The hate speech directed against Muslims is also dirtying the web, with active sharing or discussion of intolerant views against religious and ethnic minorities.

It is not a confrontation between religions, but fundamentalist religious groups have severely exacerbated the conflict.

The conference ground rules exclude radical forces Syria and Hamas thus encouraging them to persist in their role as spoilers.

On the contrary, it would be a grave mistake to assume that fanatical Islamism fully defines Saudi attitudes toward religion.

This is not true of totalitarian or fundamentalist regimes, because, to foster free societies, they must be deposed.

This argument, long discredited, resonates in the actions of the Iraqi insurgents and their fanatical allies.

Instead, the roots of Taseer s assassination lay in the dark delusions of fanatical belief, his killing supposedly undertaken to protect the faith.

The status quo was untenable. Implementing democracy, with or without regime change, was the only alternative to chaos and the rise of fundamentalism.

Once the Shah left, the radical minority that was willing to fight and die for its cause devoured the moderate majority, establishing Islamist rule in short order.

Expressions of anti Americanism will provide no protection or immunity to governments or individuals who for good reason are not prepared to endorse the terrorists radical agendas.

American radicalism, however, resulted in increasing tensions between religious communities in the Middle East, and the rise of radical Iran with its bid for regional hegemony.

Nevertheless, the stakes are far higher than in the seventeenth century, because Iran represents a threat that combines a fanatic religion with a determination to acquire nuclear weapons.

Equally significant was the development in the old Islamic party of talented leaders that wanted to break with its backward looking ways and extremist image.

And the revival of religious parties in a country created by avowed secularists opened the way for a more politically powerful but also more nationalistic and intolerant setting.

In European eyes, Americans lack such sophisticated understanding, and often have no interest in acquiring it, seeing the land around and beyond Israel as populated largely by greedy oil sheikhs and dangerous religious fanatics.

Despite the fact that there is no automatic linkage between poverty and terrorism, communities can be exposed to extreme attitudes by fanatical groups as a result of grave social and economic problems, especially when associated with the absence of civil and political liberties.

Before I know it, she has skiddled across the parking lot and in between the cars, and people behind me, with that kind of usual religious charity that the holidays bring us, wah wah wah wah.

One can predict with a high degree of confidence that the Polish Fourth Republic that the PiS would like to build will have to come to terms with the limited space in Europe for messianic visions and Christian fundamentalism.

Terrorists who have tasted success in Iraq will increasingly turn on others. Expressions of anti Americanism will provide no protection or immunity to governments or individuals who for good reason are not prepared to endorse the terrorists radical agendas.

But if it means a more anti Western Turkey increasingly oriented toward Iran, Syria, and radical Islamist movements, a major shift in international politics would be accompanied by mounting domestic instability.

These factors, together with the obvious failings of many Middle Eastern governments, have fueled the surge of fundamentalism among Muslims, American Christians, and some Israeli Jews that has now boiled over to rampant extremism, terror, and messianic visions of good versus evil.