White House spokesman Josh Earnest, bearer of one of the great inaptronyms of our time, explains: “All forms of violent extremism would be discussed in the context of the summit. . . . Violent extremism is something we want to be focused on, it is not just Islamic violent extremism that we want to counter. There are other forms.”

Indeed, there are other forms of violent extremism, about which the president might consult his buddies Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the murderous Weather Underground terrorists. There are violent environmental extremists, would-be bridge bombers coming out of the Occupy movement, the occasional animal-rights lunatic — fruits and nuts of sundry descriptions. But the world at large is not suffering from a global insurgency motivated by eccentric interpretations of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Earth in the Balance, or The Silent Scream just now.

The progressive fantasists keep assuring us that there’s a wave of terror just around the corner, soon to be perpetrated by militant, right-wing gun-lovers. But the people carrying out hideous acts of terrorism in Paris, Fort Hood, Boston, New York, Washington, etc., are not citing The Turner Diaries. They are citing the Koran.With all the usual caveats — most of the world’s Muslims want nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its pathetic primitivism — we have a specific, discrete, acute problem:

Radical Muslims are waging a holy war against the United States and the Western world at large. Their aim is enslavement or extermination. To name the enemy is not to libel Muslim patriots at home or well-meaning Muslims abroad — it is simply to acknowledge reality. There are no prominent figures in the Southern Methodist Church calling for the murder of non-Methodists, no furious Amish taking hostages from kosher markets.

Al-Qaeda et al. may no more speak for Islam at large than the IRA speaks for the Roman Catholic Church — but the radicals do speak for a not-insignificant body of homicidal maniacs, torturers, murderers of children, pizza-shop bombers, and cartoonist killers that is currently plaguing every continent on this planet save Antarctica. (Apparently, news of the gay penguins has not yet reached Cairo.)