In the past 8 years, we have seen the uncomfortable pairing of religious extremism and political power not only in the Middle East and the Islamic world, but in the halls of power in Washington D.C.

Gov. Sara Palin may not look the part, but her views seem about as close to an American version of the Taliban as any candidate that has ever been put up for the office of the Presidency. Forget hockey moms and bulldogs, perhaps the question should be what’s the difference between a dangerous Islamic fanatic and a dangerous Christian extremist.

As of last weekend, nearly 28 million copies of the anti-Islamophobic, pro-war propaganda DVD Obsession went out in newspapers (including the Fort Myers News Press) in key battleground states. with the very obvious purpose of playing to the politics of  fear in an effort to help ensure the success of the McCain/Palin Ticket.

It is time to challenge the religious extremist in our own country who seem bent on maintaining a culture of war head-on, and none of the other candidates in this race have the courage to do it. 

Don”t let the fact that I am a Muslim confuse you. This isn’t about any individual candidates personal religious convictions. This is America, and it shouldn’t matter if the individual is a Christian, Muslim, Jew, atheist or anything else. No religion has a monopoly on the virtues of Truth, Justice, and righteousness, and more importantly for the purpose of elections, no religion has a monopoly on the government of the United States of America.

The issue is not any individual’s religion, but how it will affect his or her judgement on crucial issues. Someone who is willing to disregard the Constitution and laws they swear before God to uphold for the sake of some scriptural interpretation that they claim is the exclusive version of the religious and scientific truth is not fit for office.

Anyone who is willing to allow some apocalyptic End of Times vision guide what they view as the future of humanity certainly has a constitutional right to do so as an American citizen, but as a policy maker, they become a direct threat to the safety and welfare of America and to the world at large. 

It doesn’t matter if they are enacting policies that guide bombers to their targets or march suicide bombers off to market places, religious zealots who divide the world into “us” and “them” in terms of their own petty interpretations of religious faith are a small minority that cause a self-perpetuating loop of fear, violence, and ignorance to drag down the majority of us all.

It is not a war between Christians and Muslims, it is a crisis of leadership between a small handful of extremists who have seized power and the rest of us who know there has to be a middle way.

Osama Bin Laden and Sara Palin along with their ideological and religious cohorts are two sides of the same hateful, fearful, and ignorant coin, and it is time for us to cash it in for the currency of common sense, reason, and a faith in the message of our shared Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious heritage that doesn’t require us to kill each other, but to live together in unity “under God.”

As a further primer to our side of the problem here in the U.S, the article Religious comfort for bin Laden by James Carroll of the Boston Globe does an excellent of beginning to identify the problem, and I urge everyone to check it out.