Reply #250: That's exactly what I'd tell them.

[eridani]

So what if Iran wants nukes? Pakistan, India and Israel are far larger nuke threats, but nowhere near the biggest nuke threat, which remains Russia. (Not that they mean us harm these days, but because their command and control systems are so badly deteriorated. Bush, of course, slashed funding for the Nunn-Lugar Threat Reduction Initiative which was intended to deal with this problem.)

The worst that Islamists have been able to do to us was 9-11. The only thing anybody needs to know about 9-11 is that it was eminently preventable. It happened because the current administration just didn't give a damn about stopping it. If the worst we have suffered from Islamists need not have happened, then they aren't really a threat.

Random attacks by various whackjobs are inevitable as long as the world is overpopulated and a fraction of the surplus population is alienated and unemployable at work worth doing. If the whackjobs live in Islamic countries, they'll invent a whackjob version of Islam. In Japan, it was Aum Shinrikyo. For Christians in this country it's whackjob Rapturism, and for non-Christians things like Heaven's Gate. A single crackpot in Seoul with no group affiliation whatsoever took out 100 people just by lighting off a can of gasoline in the subway at rush hour. This kind of random crap can be scary, but the chances of it happening to any one of us in particular is pretty remote.