" Launching more drone strikes than Bush ever did and compiling a secret “kill list,” President Obama’s administration took the view that al-Qaeda was like an organized crime gang—disrupt the hierarchy, destroy the gang. Theirs was a concerted and dogmatic attempt at pretending that al-Qaeda was nothing but a fringe criminal group, and not a concrete realization of an ideological phenomenon with grassroots sympathy. They took this view in part because of how successful Islamist “fellow-traveler” lobbies had been in influencing Obama’s campaign after the mistakes of the Bush years. For Islamists and their allies, the problem was “al-Qaeda inspired extremism,” and not the extremism that had inspired al-Qaeda. "

― Sam Harris , Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue