“In national-socialism (Nazism), the story was of a ‘master race’ betrayed and stabbed in the back by an enemy within. Jews had to be eliminated and Europe had to be conquered to usher in the new order where the master race would rule again as it did in Germany’s glorious antiquity. In global Islamism, the villain is the west and it can be eliminated only by a military defeat or else by the conversion of every non-Muslim to Islam. The operating vision of Islam here is not the faith practiced around the world in diverse forms, but Islam as defined by Osama bin Laden: an intolerant, puritanical and fanatical sect holding a monopoly of virtue.”

Meghnad Desai at Open Democracy, 6 February 2007

The fact that Islamism itself comes in “diverse forms” is evidently lost on Desai.