Robert Spencer is one of the writers who exaggerates the prospect of sharia law being implemented in the United States. Put another way, although there is no chance of it happening, he treats it as an imminent threat that requires a legislative fix. And when sharia bans are found unconstitutional? The judge is deemed a "dhimmi" and Spencer asserts it as a sign that "the people... have ceased to be their own rulers." Again, if sharia law as understood by Spencer was about to reign in America, it would be cause for serious alarm. Luckily, few take him seriously.

Mark Steyn is a far more talented and careful writer than Geller or Spencer, and his alarm at challenges to free speech in Europe and Canada is justified, as is his critique of the less defensible aspects of multiculturalism, always captured with an anecdote at the ready. But his method of argument is too often just series of allegedly telling anecdotes marshaled in service of an ultimately unpersuasive, defeatist narrative: that demography and a lack of civilizational confidence among Europeans dooms America to stand alone against a future dominated by Islamists.

Here let's focus on the impression he gives that he is alone in objecting to violent and illiberal manifestations of Islam. "Mark Steyn's book is...an insistence that we recognize an extraordinary threat and thus the possible need for extraordinary responses," Christopher Hitchens writes in his mostly positive review of America Alone. "He need not pose as if he were the only one with the courage to think in this way." Quite so. Despite the extraordinary changes to American life since 9/11, some justified, others not, and most supported by liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans alike, you'd think from reading Steyn that Islamist aggression is the lonely concern of a few Cassandras, rather than the central preoccupation of the national security state.

The common flaw among Geller, Spencer and Steyn: all ratchet up more anxiety about Islam than is justified by the facts. Ponder the arguments outlined in this essay alone. An impressionable person reading the trio in succession would conclude that a somnambulistic America is the world's only hope to avoid living under sharia law; that viable attempts to impose it on American citizens are ongoing even now; and that President Obama himself is supportive of the civilization-threatening jihad!

How many people can assert such things before small numbers of the disaffected take them literally? If all that were true, wouldn't a lot of people respond violently? Overheated, hyperbolic rhetoric must come naturally once you've immersed yourself in the hard core anti-jihadist blogosphere. Regulars there lose the conviction that words have precise meanings, and the belief that arguing with integrity requires staying within their bounds. Shortcuts are so much easier, hence the frequent descents into ad hominem, the constant reliance on hyperbole, and the crutch of playing on the civilizational anxieties of the audience, in an effort to shake them into awareness.