Excuse me for being a OT, but I was reading the alumni magazine “UCSB Today” in which there is a really irritating interview with the director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. It starts out with this:

It is fair to say that no one has done more to make UCSB an international showcase of global studies than Mark Juergensmeyer. It is also fair to say that no one has done more to provide a balanced, nuanced understanding of the nature of religious violence.

So, what does Mr. Super-Nuance think about prevalence of Islamic extremism?

I think most Americans understand ordinary Muslims well enough — most Muslims are just like any ordinary Christian or Jew or Buddhist or Hindu. It’s the jihadi activists who are puzzling. But for that matter, Christian militant extremists like Richard Butler and Timothy McVeigh are pretty scary and puzzling as well, though their dislike of modern society and America’s global power is not that different from the jihadis. The important thing for Americans to know is that the Muslim Extremists are as rare in the Islamic world as the Christian extremists are in the United States.

Wow. What a load of half-truths and unbelievably fatuous nonsense.