David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, has an entire column in Politico about the benefits of net neutrality. His central thesis is that without net neutrality he could never have succeeded with Tumblr. It is ironic position, considering that the empirical evidence is 100% against him. He created Tumblr without there being any net neutrality laws in place.

Despite his own experience, Mr. Karp fears that without net neutrality businesses like his might fail because internet service providers might prioritize deeper pocketed players over startups. He cites Vimeo, Etsy and Kickstarter as wonderful concepts that we should have more of in support of his argument for net neutrality, while again failing to realize that all of his examples came into existence without net neutrality rules being in place.

On the other side, Mr. Karp provides no examples of the hulking menace that exists in an internet not subject to net neutrality rules. According to Mr. Karp:

Over the past year, there’s been a real threat to that promise. The Internet providers saw an opportunity to pick winners and losers, rather than let the internet continue to sort those things out for itself. How would they pick? In lots of ways. For example, by charging companies for the ability to prioritize their traffic over everyone else’s. Content from companies that didn’t pay would be slowed down—or potentially never transmitted at all.

The only problem with the above paragraph – it isn’t true. There has been no mass attack on content providers from ISPs. The “threat to that promise” is a threat mostly dreamed up by net neutrality supporters. The ISPs have not, in any meaningful way, picked winners and losers. The only instance I know of (and the fact that there are so few should tell us just how much of a “threat” this is) is Netflix being slowed down. Netflix is a huge bandwidth hog. It seems to me that there is a perfectly rational reason to limit Netflix if a network is reaching capacity and Netflix accounts for a grossly disproportionate share of the bandwidth usage. Moreover, I don’t know how Mr. Karp and net neutrality opponents would classify a “little guy” without deep pockets, but I am guessing Netflix wouldn’t qualify, which means that the single major example where net neutrality might have prevented “predatory” behavior would be to protect one deep pocketed company from the “predations” of another.

The net neutrality platform trades on a David vs. Goliath theme, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. Because there are millions of small content providers (including yours truly) and only a handful of ISPs, the narrative of the story becomes that of the little people vs. the corporations.  In reality, you have deep pocketed, powerful players on both sides – ISPs and big-name content providers like Google, Netflix and Amazon. None of this would much matter, except for the fact that the long-term impact of net neutrality is likely to have unexpected, adverse and perverse consequences starting with decreasing investment in infrastructure and ending with the regulation of content.

The conference this week on “Countering Violent Extremism,” hosted by the White House and attended by President Obama represents the triumph of semantics over substance. Foregoing the lesser methods of uncomfortable positioning and waterboarding, the Obama administration has gone straight for the rack and the iron maiden in its efforts to torture logic and ignore the obvious. In what must be one of the dumbest assertions made in recent memory, the President has taken the position that the Islamic State isn’t Islamic, using an argument that amounts to nothing more than a theological declaration.

What we are witnessing is nothing less than the complete liberal politicization of our national security. What I mean by that is not that we have allowed politics to dictate our foreign policy – it always has and always will; foreign policy decisions are political decisions – but that we have completely subordinated the national security priority of making America safe to the domestic priority of political correctness. The White House would rather not potentially offend some Muslims, either at home or abroad, then take an honest look at the root causes behind the extremist violence that represents a significant security threat to the United States and the world.

The difference between semantics and substance is the difference between the trivial and the profound. Unfortunately Obama and the administration have confused semantics and substance, with the result that they focus on the trivial while ignoring the profound. Calling the Islamic State and Islamic terrorism what they are isn’t merely semantics. It is substance. Understanding the nature of one’s enemy, its motives and its goals is paramount to understanding how to defeat it. If you cannot acknowledge that the violence coming from groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS is motivated by Islam, then you cannot be serious about finding the most effective means to stop them.

Violent extremism is a non-term, an all-encompassing category which is meaningless in the context of identifying, analyzing and solving the real threats to the United States and to Western civilization. All violent extremism is not equally threatening to national security. There are white supremacists on isolated compounds. There are death cults like Aum Shinrikyo. There are even, as Dean Obeidallah, has reminded us, Christians employing extremist, terroristic violence in some parts of the world. However, none of these groups, though they are all violent extremists, represent a threat to the world order the way that Islamic extremists do.

The Obama administrations steadfast refusal to acknowledge that cold reality is farcical. We have now reached a point where the President of the United States has decided to weigh in on the theological issue of who is and who is not a Muslim. According to White House policy, the President of the United States has the ability and authority to decide to what religion a person belongs based upon whether the President thinks that person’s ideology reflects the “true” values of that religion. Thus, he has decided and declared the Islamic State not to be Islamic because, in his words, “[t]hey are not religious leaders. They are terrorists.” Where Obama gets the notion that being a religious leader and a terrorist are mutually exclusive is never made clear, probably because such an idea is ridiculous. He does cite a few passages from the Koran in defense of his assertion, but in doing so only demonstrates that he has not read the text or, if he has, has utterly failed to understand it. He has also, as Graeme Wood, writing the Atlantic, so eloquently demonstrated, failed to grasp that the people he accuses of not being Muslims are, in fact, fully steeped in the Koran and have studied it extensively.

And this is a key point. Obama’s facile understanding of the Koran has led him to determine (or at least declare) that ISIL is not comprised of Muslims. In doing so, he has taken an active step to say that understanding their interpretation of the Koran and what it means is fundamentally not important to defeating them. After all, if they are merely “violent extremists” who are not truly Islamic and not motivated by Islam, then understanding Islam is probably not very relevant to understanding how to defeat them.

The problem is that nothing could be further from the truth. When Obama says the following, he does so from a place of profound ignorance:

“These religious leaders and scholars preach that Islam calls for peace and for justice and tolerance toward others, that terrorism is prohibited, that the Koran says, ‘Whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind.’” “Those are the voices that represent over a billion people around the world.”

When Obama refers to innocents, he is referring to innocents as he, a liberal American sees innocents (i.e. people who have not done anything). And, indeed, if the Islamic State agreed with Obama that the people it is murdering are innocents, then they would be violating their faith. However, the fundamental problem is that ISIS does not view the people it is killing as innocents. It rejects, out of hand, Obama’s premise. Under ISIS’ interpretation of Islam, the people it is killing are guilty of crimes against God, and therefore must be exterminated. But because Obama only wants to acknowledge Muslims who are in general agreement with his worldview, he fails to grasp this basic fact.

Acknowledging the fact that ISIS is comprised of Islamic fundamentalist/terrorists is simply an acknowledgement of reality. While it may be uncomfortable to speak about such things, it is necessary. Understanding an enemy’s motivations is paramount to understanding how to defeat it. Tying an arm behind your back in a fight because the truth is ugly won’t change the truth – it will simply make you more likely to lose. Just as it would be a monumental mistake to tar all of Islam with ISIS, it is a terrible idea to run to the opposite extreme and say that they are unrelated.

I don’t claim to know an extensive amount about what has been happening in the Central Africa Republic (CAR), but it seems to me that Dean Obeidallah’s use of the conflict to try and lend support to Obama’s musings last week is inapposite. Obama, sought to downplay the religious motivation behind ISIS and other Islamic extremists through equivocation, arguing that since terrible deeds have been done by people of all faiths in the name of their religion, the current Islamic extremism is not, in fact, Islamic in nature.

Obama’s argument, of course, has many flaws, starting with the hubristic appeal to his own authority in decreeing who and who is not a Muslim, and taking it upon himself to tell the rest of the world what a true Muslim must believe in order to be deemed a Muslim. Then there is the problem that his argument rested on attacking Christianity from eight hundred years ago which, of course, is precisely the point that many critics of Islamic extremism make – Christianity evolved and completely changed in the last eight hundred years to become something gentler and more true to the “turn the other cheek” philosophy, whereas elements of Islamic teachings remain mired in a medieval world, contributing to Islamic extremism.

So, here comes Obeidallah, citing the CAR conflict, to argue that Christian terrorists are alive and well today. It is a fair point, insofar as it goes. There are Christians committing atrocious, terrorists acts in the CAR. That is indisputable, but it is not checkmate. What is happening in the CAR, however horrific, is different in kind, not just degree, from what has been happening across the globe with respect to Islamic fundamentalism and terror.

The conflict in the CAR is pitting Christians against Muslims in a tribal conflict, with both sides attacking, slaughtering and committing heinous acts against the other. The methods used by both sides are, in some cases, fully deserving of the title “terroristic”. However, what is happening in the CAR is not terrorism in the same way that Islamic terrorism is terrorism. The fighting in the CAR is not about a worldwide Jihadic struggle for dominance over the globe and a new world order. It is not a fight between the forces of a medieval mindset and modernity. It is a fight over land, resources and tribal issues.

Unlike the Jihadist, there are no Christian fighters in the CAR looking to extend a holy war across the world and bring the conflict to other countries. They are not setting off bombs in civilian areas abroad, shooting up Mosques in the Middle East or encouraging suicide attacks on believers in Mecca. Unlike the Jidhadist, the Christian (and, for that matter, the Muslims in the CAR) are not fighting about a world ideology and – this is very important – they are not an existential threat to the safety and security of the rest of the world.

Finally, something that really sets this apart from what we see with radical Islamism, is that I don’t believe there is any widespread support amongst the Christian community outside of the CAR for the actions of the Christian population there. The Catholic church, from the Pope on down is against what is happening. So too, I would imagine, would be virtually every priest, pastor, deacon and lay churchman in the world outside of the CAR. There is also no tacit support for what is going on, and certainly no active support in the form of funds raised and charities organized to aid the militants. There are no words of encouragement from church leaders. There is no media support. The most visible Christian figure in the region, Father Bernard Kinvi, has done his best to shield and protect both Christians and Muslims from reprisals.

The Christians in the CAR may, as Obeidallah suggests, be terrorists, but their terrorism is local and the world beyond the CAR faces no threat from them. The terrorists that are a threat to modernity are fundamentally different – they claim a global battlefield with every man, woman and child as a legitimate target. And, despite the fact that it is inconvenient for Obama and Obeidallah, today’s global terrorist is overwhelmingly rooted in the ideology of one religion, and it is not Christianity.