Should America expand our "War on Terror" to target all of Islam?

Newt Gingrich is now marketing a slick new, cleverly produced documentary showing absolutely horrific images of the death and destruction of 9/11 interplayed with images of Arab Leaders, Muslims worshiping, President Obama meeting with the Saudi King… Gingrich says the movie America at Risk: The War With No Name will drive the “national dialogue” about President Obama’s failure to address the rise of “Radical Islam” and its attempt to impose Sharia law on the United States. The argument goes—Some say we are at war with al Qaeda and a handful of Islamic Extremist. NO! We are NOT. All of Islam is out to get us, and we better recognize that. A number of other Republicans are picking up that banner in an attempt to paint themselves as the party that understands how things really are, and their opposition as weak and full of appeasers who will give America away rather than fight.

Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, a right-wing Christian group, called for a ban on building permits for any mosques or Islamic Centers throughout America and wants all Muslim immigration halted and all Muslims purged from the US Military. Who is Bryan Fischer, you might ask. He’s a headline speaker along with Gingrich, Mitt Romney and other notable Republicans such as Rep. Michele Bachmann, Sen. Jim DeMint, Sean Hannity, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and Rep. Mike Pence at the Values Voter Summit in Washington next week.

If the mainstream GOP decides that Islamophoobia is a winning issue for it, they will be playing a game as dangerous as juggling nitroglycerin. There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, 800,000 of them are Americans. If we really do go to war with Islam, we are looking at the largest ethnic cleansing program in the history of Earth. We would have to exterminate 200 times as many people as Adolph Hitler killed for religious bigotry. In a nuclear age, any effort to murder over a billion people living all around the globe would almost certainly end in an all-out nuclear confrontation between the superpowers. So it could spell the end of all human life on Earth.

If Islam or any other religion, for that matter, actually does try to impose their will and ways on all of us, I will fight and I suspect that all who love their religious freedom will join me. But I will also fight a bunch of callous demagogues using cultural differences and fear mongering for political gain when they risk touching off a nuclear holocaust in their thirst for power.

What do you think? Are we currently at war with all of Islam? If we are not, doesn’t shameless political pandering suggesting that we are play right into the recruiting hands of al Qaeda? Surely they will show Gingrich’s film again and again to “prove” all Americans hate Muslims. And finally, does such demagoguery risk actually provoking an all out war in which one of the two most populous religions on Earth must have all its members exterminated or forcibly converted?