No serious person doubts that Jihadists are capable of inflicting enormous death and devastation, as the events in Amman this week demonstrate yet. But are they a threat to democracy in the way that the Nazis and Communists were (as Cushman implicitly suggests with his title)? No way. For all the harm jihadists can inflict (and, again, I stress that I am not denying their capacity to inflict much death and destruction), they are not capable of destroying any nation. While the jihadists may dream of establishing an Islamic caliphate, they completely lack the military capability to achieve their ideals. Nor have the Jihadists shown the capacity to subvert the democratic process from within, as both the Nazis and the Communists did (think of Konrad Henlein's Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia or the various Communist Parties in Eastern Europe after World War II). All these differences fundamentally separate the Jihadists from Nazis or Communists. Imagine how much different the Nazi threat would have been if Hitler had never taken power in Germany but remained a street thug. Cushman’s discussion of 9/11 is similarly flawed. The reason Al Qaeda attacked such prominent symbols of American power is not because they wanted to destroy our government. As the historian Paul Schroeder has pointed out in an perceptive article in The American Conservative, any fairly intelligent person would know that an attack like that of 9/11, or even ten such attacks, would not suffice to defeat the United States. On the contrary, as an experienced warrior, Bin Laden surely knew that such an action would mobilize an extraordinary counter-response on the part of the United States. That was precisely the point of 9/11 – in Schroeder’s words, to provoke the United States “into declaring open war on him and his followers united in a true, heroic Islamic resistance movement.” That doesn’t mean the United States should ignore the threat of radical Islam. But Thomas Cushman would serve democracy far better if he focused on composing a wise and intelligent response to the jihadists rather than exhort his fellow liberals to recognize the unprecedented global menace of Islamofascism.