To some degree I am inclined to think this piece by Christer Lindholm reasonable and down to earth. On the other hand I do see a number of points in it which one well could comment on:
For example, there is the point of 9/11 and the number of people killed in the event. Sure, I do agree that it was most probably young Arabs who were hijacking the airplanes. But, how typical are they for Islam? And what was their subjective intention – did they want to kill many people, or did they, rather, want to knock down a symbol (accepting the resulting deaths as something like ”collateral damage”)? And who everybody was actually responsible for the outcome of it all? I am prepared to defend at any time in public (also in the web edition of Ny Tid) my view that (a) the official account of the events is incompatible with the laws of physics, and that (b) Israel had very obviously a hand in the matter, although (c) not without the permission by some very powerful persons in the US administration. Thus, on whom do we now blame all those dead ones – on the Islamist hijackers, on the Jews who were involved, or on the – presumably – Christian members of the US administration?
Another point concerns Sayyid Qutb, about whom already Peter Lodenius was writing at an earlier occasion. This man was obviously a sexual neurotic, which in turn tends to promote fanaticism. His idea that violence were an adequate way to establish a theocracy he could well have taken straight from the Old Testament (of which both Islam and Christianity are offshoots). – In fact I had for some reason recently to give the Old Testament another reading, and I assure the reader that it VERY strongly promotes genocide, sexual neurosis, and blind obedience to preachers. All of which could well be the reason why the Islamist terror is, in principle, not so very different from the terror of the US Christian Right (which, as happening on the other side of the Atlantic, is not very much talked about in Europe). The Christian terror includes the murder of people who work in abortion clinics and also the promotion of capital punishment for homosexuality by missionaries in Africa.
Altogether, is Islamist terror ”ett konkret och allvarligt hot”? To which I am inclined to answer that ”not very much at us”, but ”certainly in the Middle East”. As the reasons for it I see (a) that the Islamists have learned to use the Western technology for their propaganda purposes, (b) that via the oil trade they have vast financial resources, (c) that a Middle Eastern style education makes young men especially vulnerable to insults (to which they are not so rarely exposed in the West and by the West), (d) that opinion making is in Islamic societies still very much happening by listening to preachers, who (e) are preaching sexual neurosis (which leads to fanaticism and contempt for life). On top of which comes of course the overall social situation in the countries of the Middle East (e.g. vast numbers of unemployed young men, etc.).
And what to do? Presumably more efforts to integrate Muslim immigrants, careful instruction at school (including introduction to, at least, other Abrahamic religions, and also very much evolution theory), very much less respect for religious and cultural traditions (concerning, a.o. treatment of animals), including a tighter supervision of preachers and removal from office of those who preach hostility. All of which could, where necessary, of course also be applied to Christians.