A Billion Muslims Inflamed:

From Obama at his 9/10/10 presser:

....Well, on the second -- on your second question, there's no doubt that when someone goes out of their way to be provocative in ways *that we know can inflame the passions of over a billion Muslims around the world*, at a time when we've got our troops in a lot of Muslim countries, that's a problem. And it has made life a lot more difficult for our men and women in uniform who already have a very difficult job.....

I connect Obama’s comment to him (probably unintentionally) undercutting his rejection of “the war against Islam” cliché. The context of Obama’s comment is inveighing against Jones’s Koran burning more or less in tandem or lock step with Gates and Petraeus in the context of concern for extra danger from the burning to American troops .

So, I suggest, Obama (as did Gates and Petraeus) draws an inextricable link between the "billion" (like 75% to 90% of all Muslims) "inflamed" Muslims and putting of American troops in a particular harm’s way by dint of a nothing, nut case loser with 25 congregants threatening to burn Korans.

No other religion on God’s green earth could provoke such a comment. And if it’s true that, arguendo, so many Muslims would be so inflamed with the implication of danger to American troops, then we have a basis for thinking that no reasonable accommodation will work with Muslims and concluding that we can’t readily in fact distinguish extreme or so called less than extreme Muslims. In a word this inflammation is a ground for thinking Huntingon was right as to a "clash of civilizations."

That distinction between extreme and non extreme Muslims is central to the rejection of the cliché that we are at war with Islam.

I want to make it clear that this not my line of reasoning. But it is a line of reasoning that’s fairly inferable from Obama’s coment.

One can't, given Obama’s comment taken in context and put together with what Gates said and did and what Petraeus said, compare his description of, and concern over, the inflamed Muslim reaction to the burning to the the reactions or conduct of any other extant religion to a comparable provocation. The latter is unimaginable to me in the world as I know it.