Recommendation: It is not enough to treat Islamism by attacking the terrorist cells of al Qaida or even the assets of the Terror-masters who sponsor them though it certainly helps to have them appear on the defensive, scattered and failing vis-avis the United States. Islamism needs to be ideologically discredited in Muslim eyes the way Nasserism now looks to be a dead-end road which means a battle of ideas needs to be joined in addition to the counterterrorist efforts. Competing value systems – specifically ones completely incompatible with Islamist values – need to be injected into the sterile Arab-Muslim intellectual world in force. Free-market economics, Lockean individualism, democracy, equality of the sexes, freedom of expression, free flow of uncontrolled information – need to be targeted at the youth of the Arab-Muslim world as a memetic alternative to both the one-party state and the Islamist revolutionaries. We do not need unqualified successes and conversion of Arab states to Jeffersonian republics in order to be effective but we do need to counter Islamism with a positive message of reform.

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