Some in high places are beginning to catch on that our problems are not just with bin Laden or Al Qaeda. We are threatened by a much deeper mindset within the Islamic world. The NYT has this article on the recent report of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. I suggest you read the whole thing, but a portion is below. Hat tip Jihadwatch.

As radical Islam spreads globally through online forums and chat rooms, a group of obscure Arab religious thinkers may come to exert more influence over the jihadist movement than Osama bin Laden and other well-known leaders of Al Qaeda, a research group at the United States Military Academy has concluded.

In a study billed as the “first systematic mapping” of an ideology sometimes called jihadism, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has found that Mr. bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, have had a relatively minor influence on the movement’s intellectual foundation. Among the network’s ideologists, they have come to be seen more as propagandists than strategic thinkers.

And while the two Qaeda leaders have released a flurry of video and audio messages to their followers over the past year, the study found that the scholarly work of a group of Saudi and Jordanian clerics — most notably Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Jordanian — seems more likely to influence the next generation of Islamic militants.
. . .
The report found that radical Islam, sometimes called Salafism, is so deeply embedded in the Arab world that Salafis now constitute a “majority or significant portion” of the Muslim population in the Middle East and North Africa.

Historically, we are in another hot period in the nearly 1400 year-long war by Islam against everyone else.