In any case, the fear of building up Pan-Islamist power is misplaced for the same reason that fretting about the threat from latter-day caliphalists is misguided. Smith has already hit upon one of the reasons why politically active Pan-Islamism will go nowhere: the internal divisions and differences among Muslims, which separate them by ethnicity, language, culture and sect, make Pan-Islamism as non-viable as a movement as the fictitious construct of “Islamofascism” is nonsensical propaganda. Like the fiction of a unified communist world, which conveniently ignored the national rivalries and hatreds that actually shaped the policies of communist states

Obama showed no signs of defining America’s real enemies according to the outlines of jihadist self-presentation and refused to lend credibility to a simplified definition of jihadism that encompasses any and all Islamic resistance and revolutionary groups under some overarching banner that obliges us to make all of them our enemy.