First it was Mitt Romney, who in an article for Foreign Affairs said that the threat posed by radical Islam was “just as real” as that from the Nazis and the Soviet Union. And now we have presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain saying the US needs a leadership “to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.”

To realise what poisonous nonsense this, look back to the Palestinian liberation movement, whose terrorism at the Munich Olympics and constant plane hijackings kept the world jittery throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Or the IRA, which managed, together with its Protestant opposite numbers, to hold a whole province of the United Kingdom hostage to violence, besides murdering the Queen’s uncle and nearly succeeding in killing Margaret Thatcher. These were very disturbing events, but to my recollection no one, neither politician nor commentator, described the threat from these terrorist groups as “the transcendent challenge of our time,” or likened these minority movements to the threat of the biggest military powers of the 1940s and 1950s. The threat posed by these groups was clearly on a different scale to that of Nazi conquest or, later, worldwide atheistic communism whose creed was permanent revolution.

If McCain wants to continue like this, I would ask him first to reflect on the recent remarks of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who during my Prospect interview with him said, in response to Romney’s statement, “A candidate who says that kind of stuff either thinks, probably correctly, that the American people are not well informed—in which case he’s demagoguing—or he’s stupid enough to believe it himself. In either case it offers a compelling argument as to why such a candidate should not be president.”

This, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with McCain’s talk. The recent election in Pakistan should give him pause. Some anti-Musharraf voices argued in favour of an election open to all parties, including the fundamentalists. The claim was that an open election in the western border areas, where the Taliban are active and the al Qaeda leadership may be hiding, would be difficult for the Islamic fundamentalist parties, then in power, to win. The Americans and the British refused to buy this argument, preferring Musharraf to kill off the militants. But this indeed is what happened. The militant religious parties were roundly defeated in the North-West Frontier Province by the moderate regional Awami National party. Although Pathan-based, it wants to end the violence not by military might but by sustained dialogue and by reviving the neglected economic development of the province.

The conclusion is obvious. Even in desperate situations, if the Islamic masses are given an open vote they will tend to vote for moderates who shun violence. In recent years they have they done so consistently in Indonesia and Turkey, two of Islam’s most populous states. So too in Malaysia and Nigeria.

Islamic terrorism remains a marginal force. Its adherents and sympathisers have grown because of the crudity and violence of the policies of George W Bush and Tony Blair. McCain seems to be heading to stir the pot even more. There is a danger that this kind of crude campaigning will increase the threat it aims to thwart.