In his op-ed piece in yesterday’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman made a number of astute remarks about the current state of international jihadism and the construction, in American public discourse, of the Muslim qua object. Nevertheless, he still managed to throw good sense to the wind, suggesting that what’s really needed is an intra-Islamic civil war:

Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam. We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things—namely that you could enslave people because of the color of their skin. We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.

Islam needs the same civil war. It has a violent minority that believes bad things: that it is O.K. to not only murder non-Muslims—“infidels,” who do not submit to Muslim authority—but to murder Muslims as well who will not accept the most rigid Muslim lifestyle and submit to rule by a Muslim caliphate.

Read the entire piece here.