At a breakfast in January, President Obama reached all the way back to the Crusades for an example of violence purportedly motivated by Christian extremism. Days later, when three Muslims were murdered in Chapel Hill, social media erupted with demands that Christians be called upon to condemn the attacks in the same way that Muslims are called upon to condemn acts of Islamic terrorism, and the disappointment was palpable when the man charged with those murders turned out to be a militant atheist and Rachel Maddow fan who was angry about a parking dispute.

State Department flack Marie Harf, fresh off her jobs-for-jihadis bit, offered up Joseph Kony — a practitioner of Ancholi mystical traditions with 88 wives, a flair for Biblical apocalypticism, and, if we take him at his word, 13 spirits (one of them Chinese) dwelling within him — as an example of “Christian militant” terrorism. This isn’t new: Timothy McVeigh (agnostic) and John Salvi (a schizophrenic who believed himself to be one of the thieves crucified with Jesus and who obsessed over an imaginary scheme in which the Vatican would issue its own currency) have been presented from time to time as evidence that the violent jihadist tendency is not limited to the religion of which jihad is a central tenet.

Meanwhile, in the real world . . . President Barack Obama, who still believes that his job consists of giving speeches, convened a “Summit on Countering Violent Extremism,” the purpose of which was to provide a platform for the president to give a keynote speech. In it he insisted, as he does, that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, and that arguments to the contrary only lend credibility to the Islamic terrorist organizations that have nothing to do with Islam.

He cited a letter from a fifth-grader, a Muslim girl named Sabrina, who wrote: “If some Muslims do bad things, that doesn’t mean all of them do.” President Obama was impressed with these remarks — “the wisdom of a little girl,” he called them. If the alternative is Marie Harf, we suppose he could do worse.

The problem is that (1) some of the world’s Muslims do sympathize with Islamic-supremacist views, (2) there are an awful lot of them, and (3) Islamic organizations are the preeminent practitioners of terrorism around the world at the moment.

President Obama can try to explain to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his colleagues that their project is not a genuinely Islamic one. Drop Joseph Kony off at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and his eccentric syncretism is revealed for what it is, but Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islam is the Islam of millions in Iraq, in Pakistan, in Egypt, in Indonesia. Radical Islam is a longstanding part of Islam, not an amendment to it.