Since 9/11, Americans have been treated to an ongoing tutorial by the self-professed best-and brightest from America’s universities, media, Christian clergy, and national government explaining how American Muslims become radicalized into Islamist militants. These Muslims, say the country’s brains-trust, are discriminated against by other U.S. citizens; are disenfranchised by poverty; have a hard time transitioning to U.S. society from the Muslim culture they lived in abroad;hate all non-Muslims, or are brain-washed by cynical Islamist leaders and so learn to hate America and become eager to waste their lives in attacking it. These same explanations have been spewed forth by the aforementioned elites ever since the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and now fourteen years they later they are again being served up to explain to the citizenry — really, to mislead the citizenry — what radicalized the Garland, Texas, attackers.

Now each of the foregoing elements may have some peripheral impact on radicalizing young American Muslims, but they would all amount to nothing if the main motivational force — U.S. government policies and actions in the Islamic world — was absent. The attack in Garland, Texas, did not occur because two Muslims were out for a walk and, being bored, decided to kill some non-Muslim cartoonists. The attack occurred because Ms. Geller and her violence-seeking organization announced and then staged an event meant to flamboyantly defame, denigrate, and ridicule the Prophet Muhammad. The Simpson-Soofi attack in Garland was a planned, if poorly executed, operation meant to kill those who seek to humiliate Muslims and their faith by savaging the Prophet. Cause and effect are ever at hand, and in this case the attackers were responding to an attack by Geller et al. that for them and many other Muslims was much more painful than receiving a physical beating.

This cause-and-effect theme has been the constant reality of the U.S. confrontation with Islam since the late-Osama bin Laden began speaking publicly in 1996. He then explained that the mujahideen would continue attacking the United States as long as it maintained a foreign policy that defended Arab tyrannies, unquestioningly supported Israel, attacked and/or occupied Muslim territory, and denigrated the Islamic faith. Bin Laden thus put the U.S. government on notice that its actions and policies would motivate al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups to attack U.S. interests. In response, the U.S. government under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton has intensified and expanded the actions and policies that bin Laden specified as war motivators. In the case of Garland, Ms. Geller’s meeting might have been the immediate reason for the attack, but her nonsense — blasphemy is a non-starter for anyone taught good manners by their parents — pales in comparison to the success that the Clinton-Bush-Obama/Cinton troika has had in maintaining policies that provide the single most important source of motivation for both the worldwide spread of the Islamist insurgency and for the attacks that will eventually become routine events inside the United States.

While the Garland attack, and the sophomoric Geller meeting that prompted it, have almost faded from the media — but not, you can bet, from the mind of the mujahideen — it is worth noting that Ms. Geller’s childish and intended-to-create-violence conference is only part of what is the small, private-sector contribution to the U.S. government’s mindless agenda for motivating the further growth and geographical spread of what is now a nearly worldwide Islamist insurgency. While the zany Ms. Geller and her merry band of blasphemers were seeking violence in Texas, Washington was:

• Continuing its so far dismally unsuccessful but clearly ISIS-benefiting U.S. re-intervention in Iraq. So far our generals have managed to graphically revalidate what was already known: air power cannot win a war unless aircraft are dropping nuclear weapons, and that the hundreds of billions of U.S.-taxpayer dollars spent on arming and training the Iraqi army has produced — as in Afghanistan — a miserably incompetent military force that excels only in abandoning its weapons and sprinting away from the enemy. As this is published, in fact, ISIS forces have taken Ramadi.

• Being perceived across the Muslim world as supporting Israel’s recent decision to build 900 more homes for Israelis in east Jerusalem. And this after the Muslim world had witnessed the spectacle of most of the AIPAC-owned U.S. congressman and senators from both parties showing more loyalty to the Israeli prime minister and the war he wants than to their own country’s president, security, independence, and national interests.

• Supporting and applauding a coalition of Saudi-led Arab tyrants in their air war on Yemen’s Shia Houthis and, truthfully, any Yemeni who is in the way. The Sunni Arabs will find that air power is insufficient to beat the Houthis, and they will be left to decide whether to commit ground forces. Here is a truly lose-lose situation for the ossified tyrants. If the Saudi-led coalition decides to try to eradicate the Houthis by using Sunni Arab ground forces — and it is not a sure thing that they can do so — al-Qaeda, ISIS, and a large part of Yemen’s Sunni majority will remain heavily armed, as anti-al-Saud as ever, and utterly unwilling to accept any Potemkin Yemeni regime the tyrants try to install. The Saudi-led coalition over the long run may well destroy the Houthis only to see that they have midwifed the birth of an Islamic state in Yemen.

• Publicly cooperating with Iran in Iraq to fight ISIS, and implicitly with the Syrian Alawites and Shia Hezbollah to do the same. Now this is a piece of stupidity that is so rank that even bin Laden — who deemed U.S. leaders reliably but not suicidally stupid — could not have imagined it. Washington has concocted a policy that puts the United States on the side of apostate Shias and Shia-offshoot groups against the entire Sunni world. Like the 2003 U.S.-led war in Iraq, Washington’s decision to side with the Shias in Iraq and Syria against the Sunni world amounts to the same kind of long-desired but totally unexpected gift that Ralphy received in the Christmas Story movie; that is, a Red Ryder B-B Gun of a policy. And this gift is made more saucily piquant and hilarious for the Islamists by Washington’s bizarre (insane?) decision to simultaneously assist the Sunni Arab tyrants’ as they joyously kill off the Iran-supported Yemeni Shias.

The old saying that when you have dug yourself into a hole it’s best to stop digging has seldom been more applicable than in regard to U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world. Clinton, Bush, and Obama/Clinton are all smart enough to know — they are all Ivy Leaguers, you know — that they have been and still are motivating our Islamist enemies, and yet they are also so divorced from reality and lost in theory that they are unwilling to kill those they have motivated and cannot recognize that America is up to its waist in a religious war — they are Ivy all Leaguers, you know. What to do? Stop U.S. intervention in the Islamic world, reissue President Washington’s 1793 Proclamation of Neutrality, and, as diplomatically as possible, tell Sunnis, Shias, Israelis, American Israel-Firsters, and Europeans to (a) piss off and (b) enjoy stewing in their own lethal juices.

Oh yes, and never again cast a vote for a presidential candidate who graduated from an Ivy League university.