A Personal, Internal Struggle to Come Up With All the Applicable Cliches

So, what's your take on that there "jihad," Mr. President (queried the reporter during Obama's visit to India, a nation that has had some run-ins with the concept)? Robert Spencer quotes the all-too-predictable response:

Obama initially seemed taken aback, fumbling for an answer: “Well…” Pause. “You know, uh…” Pause. Then he fell back on some clichés from back in Great World Religions class: “The phrase Jihad has lot of meanings within Islam, and is subject to a lot of different interpretations. But I will say that first, Islam is one of the world’s great religions.” Having begun mining the boilerplate, he finally hit something resembling a stride: “And, uh, more than a billion people who practice Islam, the overwhelming majority, uh, view their obligations to their religion as ones that reaffirm peace and justice, and fairness and tolerance. I think all of us recognize that this great religion in the hands of a few extremists has been distorted to justify violence against innocent people that is never justified.”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Oh, sorry. I seem to have nodded off there for a moment. (Inane, oft-repeated bromides tend to have that effect on me.) One of the world's great religions, huh? Well, okay. But pretending that it's all peace and fairness and that other good stuff is a bit of a stretch, no? I mean, whatever else the religion's founder was, he was, first and foremost, a warrior. And since he was a war-maker, and a very successful one at that, and since Muslims are instructed to emulate him because he's the most perfect human being ever, it should come as no surprise if some of them (Obama would call "extremists but, really, they're by-the-book Muslims) would want to be warriors, too.

Consider this, Mr. President: Had a "great religion"
sprung up around, say, Genghis Khan or Atilla the Hun, how accurate would it be to refer to it as a religion of peace?