Richard Miniter has alerted me to an error I made in my post on his talk here (read the comments for his message and my response), but he did not dispute my core assertion, that he holds to the demonstrably false line that Islam’s core teachings do not encourage the jihad violence that we see around the world today.
I am happy to report that that assertion was disproven in all kinds of ways at today’s session of the symposium — especially during the morning session. Brigitte Gabriel spoke movingly and passionately of how she and her family suffered from jihad violence during her childhood in Lebanon; Babu Suseelan of the Indian American Intellectual Forum traced the violent advance of jihad in India directly to the jihad ideology; …and I explained why everyone talks about moderate Muslims and longs to make common cause with them, but only very few can be found and those seem to have little or no following in the Islamic world.
This was a groundbreaking and in many ways encouraging conference. I heard there are plans for more, and hope there will be.