[hermit22]

He doesn't even get it right. There is no such thing as fundamentalist Islam. Fundamentalism applies to a Christian religious movement around 1900 that called for a return to the 'fundamentals' of Christianity.

The difference with the Islamic extremism that is fueling Bin Laden, et al. is that he isn't calling for a return to anything. Instead, he is, by account of most Islamic scholars, misinterpreting the Quran.

So the use of the term fundamentalism is either an attempt to frame the thinking of these people in Western terms, which is not necessarily an accurate undertaking, or a demonization based on the perjorative nature of the term. I think that because of the way the term has slipped into our mainstream consciousness, it's a combination of the two. And that always bothers me - because without an accurate understanding of the enemy, we are bound to over or under qualify who the enemy actually is.

Sorry, that's just my basic rant about the term 'fundamentalist Islam.' I prefer the term extremist, which doesn't carry the connotations of the first term (of course, it has its own problems, but that's a whole different story).

And as for the manifesto above - I think I'd have to agree with those who see it as a flaming hunk of crap. It doesn't actually add anything constructive to the argument, except to frame the extremes on each side as extremes. And after all that, it ends up taking a moderately rightist view without considering a moderate leftist view. This is, of course, supposing that the argument can be framed on a 2-dimensional, left-right plane. I tend to think that it's more Cartesian.