Nevertheless, the presence of doctors and engineers in fundamentalist movements stands out.

It is also feared that Islamists may one day turn Turkey into a fundamentalist state.

Perhaps because so many other taboos have fallen, the taboo on sex with children is guarded with almost fanatical zeal.

In Uganda, in addition to the usual causes of conflict, we have been fighting a fanatical, satanic rebel group, the self styled Lord's Resistance Army.

A radical minority is using violence to impose a simplified and ideological version on a mainstream with more diverse views.

Radicals use the inability to attain political objectives peacefully to inspire fanatical action and to justify forms of violence normally considered unacceptable.

As a result, in both Europe and the United States, much of the debate over immigration is dominated by illiberal voices, the most insistent belonging to politicians who promise to protect the cultural integrity of the homeland against the presumed degeneracy of the alien.

According to the McCain campaign s calculus, a political outsider with redneck views would appeal to white working class voters.

Though liberalizing reforms could cure Russia s ailments, such an agenda is unlikely to be embraced in a corruption plagued country with an emphatically illiberal leadership. Putin, after all, has sought to promote a neo Slavophile identity defined above all by suspicion of Western cultural and intellectual influence.

But the anger of young Muslims results primarily from revulsion at their corrupt leaders, and the subservience of these rulers to the United States. It is a bitterness rooted, in other words, in material causes, not in some fanatical, irrational, and anti democratic sentiment whose adherents must either be re educated or crushed.