One of the least-noted defining moments of the early twenty-first century came in the wake of the 9/11 jihad attacks, when President George W. Bush insisted that the Islamic world held the same values that the West held, and so if a few political adjustments were made, the problem of Islamic jihad terrorism would disappear, and the world would enter a new period of harmony and peace. The only problem with this vision was that the basic premise was false: the prevailing values in much of the Islamic world are quite different from those of Westerners, as a prominent Muslim cleric once again recently demonstrated.
