Andy: You and Jen Rubin make some fine points, but I don’t know if they change my mind all that much. First of all, I don’t know that al-Qaeda isn’t racist. You follow this stuff more closely than I do, but it seems to me I’ve read lots of stuff about how “the Arabs” in Afghanistan look down their noses at the locals. The leadership of al-Qaeda certainly seems top-heavy with upper class Arabs. It’s certainly true that Islamist ideology doesn’t promote racism. But why should that be dispositive? Soviet ideology didn’t promote racism either. Indeed, the Soviets not only rejected racism, they campaigned on their anti-racism all around the world to great effect. And yet, Castro’s Cuba is racist. Communist Romania was racist. The Soviet Union was deeply racist. If memory serves, white Russian women received “Hero of the Motherland” awards — and subsidies — or some such if they bore enough children. They didn’t give such prizes to the more Asiatic races in the supposedly race-blind Soviet Union. The stories of African-American Communists who went to the Soviet Union in pursuit of a racist-free society are heartbreaking. And don’t get me started on the Soviet Union and the Jews. But certainly we can agree that while Islamist doctrine strikes many universalist chords, it does have particularist appeals as well. Whether or not Islamists are racists might be debatable. That Islamists are anti-Semitic is fairly well-established. Again, I think Islamist ideology is really important, but there’s a tendency to think that ideology will completely swamp other cultural trends. I think the closer one gets to facts on the ground the more fuzzy some of these things become. (Fascism in Italy wasn’t inherently anti-Semitic, fascism in Germany was nothing if not anti-Semitic. Why? Because Germany was deeply receptive to anti-Semitic appeals while Italians weren’t) Just look at the entangled role race plays in the Sudanese situation. I suspect that in Sub-Saharan Africa, the story might be similarly complicated. Regardless, I have no idea if focusing on al-Qaeda’s racism (real or alleged) is well-advised in the African context, but it doesn’t seem absurd to me that a black American president might find it productive to raise the subject — in Africa. When trying to rally allies against an enemy, arguments that work for one constituency might fall flat for another. Pointing to Nazi anti-Semitism might not have aroused much enthusiasm from some Eastern European nations, while pointing to the invasion of Poland might. Likewise, pointing to the anti-Semitism of al-Qaeda won’t elicit extra support from Saudi Arabia, but noting that al-Qaeda wants to destroy the Saudi royal family does bring them into the fold quite nicely. Different horses for different courses.