When Americans hear the word "extremist," a very specific image comes to mind. It's a brown-skinned man in a distant land, shouting in a foreign language, probably holding a weapon. It's a scene from a movie — visceral, alien, unmistakable. That image has been so thoroughly imprinted by decades of media conditioning that most Americans could sketch it from memory.
But the most dangerous form of extremism in the world today doesn't look like that at all.
It looks like a man in a suit behind a podium, speaking in calm, measured tones about "precision strikes" and "eliminating threats." It looks like a news anchor nodding along as a retired general explains why bombing a school is a tragic but understandable consequence of war. It looks like your neighbor at a barbecue shrugging and saying, "War is messy."
It looks, in other words, like us.
What Is Extremism?
There are many forms of extremism in this world, and they differ vastly in scale and destruction, but they are all extremism. To name just a few examples: The Iranian regime massacring thousands of its own protesters in January. Hamas committing war crimes on October 7th, 2023. Putin leveling entire Ukrainian cities to resurrect old dreams of Russian imperial dominance. Saudi Arabia and China crushing dissent while invoking national security to justify it. Weekly mass shootings in the US. Suicide bombings in Niger and Pakistan. Netanyahu presiding over a campaign of near total destruction in Gaza that has killed over 72,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 171,000 — a campaign that Israel's own leading human rights organizations, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, have concluded is a genocide. All of it is extremism.
But what do all of these have in common? Strip away the flags, the languages, the religions, the ideologies — and you find the same thing at the core: the willingness to accept the mass killing of civilians for a political aim. That is extremism. Not the rhetoric. Not the volume of the voice. Not the color of the skin. The willingness to kill civilians, or to excuse their killing, for a cause.
By that definition — the only one that is morally consistent — the question is not whether we are extremists. The question is how we have avoided seeing it for so long.
The Extremism We Can't See
We can spot extremism instantly in others. We can name it in Iran, condemn it in Russia, denounce it in every corner of the globe. But when it wears our flag, speaks our language, and kills in our name — it becomes invisible. Not because it isn't there, but because we've built an entire vocabulary designed to hide it from ourselves. "Collateral damage." "Precision strikes." "Fog of war." "Regrettable but necessary."
These phrases don't describe accidents. They are the language of a society that has accepted the killing of civilians as a normal cost of doing business — and developed an entire lexicon to keep that acceptance from feeling like what it is.
And right now, that vocabulary is working overtime.
What We Are Doing Right Now
As I write this, the United States and Israel are three weeks into a bombing campaign against Iran. According to Iran's Health Ministry, at least 1,444 Iranians have been killed and over 18,500 wounded, the majority of them civilians. The independent human rights organization HRANA puts the total death toll even higher, at over 3,100. UNICEF reports that more than 200 children have been killed in Iran alone. Sixty-five schools and dozens of hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. On the first day of the war, a missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab, killing up to 175 schoolchildren aged seven to twelve. The US has struck over 7,000 targets. Human Rights Watch has called for the school strike to be investigated as a war crime.
This follows two years of US-backed Israeli operations in Gaza that systematically destroyed every university, most hospitals, and entire neighborhoods block by block — killing over 72,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children, with the US providing the bombs, the funding, and the diplomatic cover at every step.
These are not allegations from adversaries. These are documented facts reported by the United Nations, international human rights organizations, independent journalists, and in some cases Israel's own civil society.
Now. Read those paragraphs again and ask yourself: if another country were doing this, would you hesitate to call it extremism?
The Supreme Crime
Here is what the "precision strikes" crowd never wants to discuss.
Under international law, aggression is not just another war crime. It is the gravest crime of all. At Nuremberg, the judges called the launching of aggressive war "the supreme international crime" because it "contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." Every horror that follows from an aggressive war — every dead child, every bombed hospital, every refugee — is the legal and moral responsibility of those who started it. That's why Nuremberg reserved its harshest punishment for the crime of aggression itself, not just for the atrocities committed along the way.
The United States and Israel initiated this attack. Negotiations were underway in February. An Omani mediator reported significant progress. Iran was making concessions. Trump said he was "not thrilled" with the talks. Then the bombs fell. We didn't exhaust diplomacy. We abandoned it.
If the US hadn't attacked, 165 children in Minab would still be alive. Those children are not "collateral damage." They are victims of a crime that our government chose to commit. The perpetrators are responsible for all the deaths at the scene of the crime they initiated. That is not a radical legal theory. That is the foundational principle of international law established at Nuremberg — a tribunal we created.
The Extremism of Rational Men in Suits
When we picture extremism, we picture irrationality. Fanaticism. Someone who has lost their mind. But the most lethal form of extremism in human history has always been the kind that considers itself reasonable.
The architects of the Iraq War were Yale-educated policy professionals. The officials who calculated that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children from sanctions were "worth it" were seasoned diplomats. The people planning this bombing campaign went to the best schools, wrote policy papers, held strategy meetings, and made PowerPoint presentations before they struck over 7,000 targets across Iran — destroying schools, hospitals, oil facilities, heritage sites, and residential neighborhoods. These are the same people who provided the bombs, the funding, and the diplomatic cover while Israel leveled Gaza. None of that was an accident. All of it was planned.
This is not the extremism of madmen. This is the extremism of spreadsheets and PowerPoints. It is the extremism of people who believe that some lives matter so much less than others that their deaths require nothing more than a shrug and a euphemism.
And it is not confined to the powerful. It lives in every person who hears that 175 schoolgirls were killed by an American missile and reaches for an excuse instead of reaching for outrage. "War is messy." "It wasn't intentional." "What about what their government did to its own people?" "You're being anti-American." These are not rational arguments. They are the defense mechanisms of a society that cannot face what it is doing. (I've cataloged these excuses and responded to them in detail here.)
Every single one of these responses meets the definition. Every one accepts the killing of civilians for a political aim. Every one prioritizes a geopolitical objective over the lives of children. That is extremism. The fact that it comes dressed in calm tones and reasonable language doesn't make it less extreme. It makes it more dangerous — because it passes as normal.
George Bush, Netanyahu, Osama Bin Laden, Biden, Putin, Trump — they all share one thing. They all invoke a justification for killing civilians in the name of the greater good. They mask their extremism behind different languages — some religious, some secular, some nationalist — but the result is always the same: dead civilians whose deaths are deemed acceptable by the perpetrators and their supporters.
The only difference is that some of these men are called extremists, and some are called presidents.
One Question That Exposes Everything
Here is a question that cuts through every excuse:
Would you support this bombing campaign if the targets were in your own country?
If Iran had military assets hidden near a school in Ohio, would you support a foreign power bombing that school and killing American children? If an enemy government struck 7,000 targets across the United States in three weeks, killing over a thousand civilians and destroying hospitals and heritage sites, would you call it "messy but necessary"? Would you shrug and say "war is war"?
Of course not. You would call it terrorism. You would call it an atrocity. You would call it the worst crime imaginable.
And this — this right here — reveals the core of our extremism. It is not that we believe killing civilians is acceptable. It is that we believe killing their civilians is acceptable. Nationalism is a form of geographical racism. It makes some lives matter and others disposable. And it is so normalized in our culture that pointing it out sounds radical, when in fact it is the bare minimum of moral consistency.
The excuses only flow in one direction. No one says "war is messy" when Americans die. No one says "collateral damage" when the dead children are ours. The entire machinery of rationalization exists to maintain one distinction: their deaths are tragic but necessary; our deaths are unforgivable crimes. That distinction is the beating heart of extremism. We just don't call it that when it's ours.
Starting With Ourselves
I am not writing this to say that America is the only extremist nation on earth. It isn't. The Iranian regime is brutal. Authoritarian governments around the world commit atrocities. Religious extremism is real and deadly.
But I am an American. My tax dollars fund these bombs. My government carries out these strikes. My society generates the excuses that make them possible. And so my responsibility — our responsibility — begins here. Not with condemning the extremism of distant others, which is easy and costs us nothing, but with confronting the extremism in our own house, which is hard and costs us everything we thought we knew about ourselves.
I know the response. "So what would you do about Iran's nuclear program? Just let them build a bomb?" This is the trap that pro-war logic always sets: reduce every situation to two options — bomb them or do nothing — and then call you naive for refusing to choose. But we weren't doing nothing. Negotiations were on the table in February. Iran was making concessions. We walked away and chose war. This is not the first time. We had a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015. We tore it up. We had diplomacy with Iraq. We chose invasion. Every time, the "what would you do?" crowd forgets that we already had an answer and rejected it in favor of bombs. Diplomacy is not naive. What's naive is believing that this time — after Iraq, after Afghanistan, after Libya, after two decades of catastrophic failure — bombing a country into submission will finally work.
This is not about guilt. I am not asking you to feel bad. Guilt is passive. It changes nothing. What I am asking for is moral clarity that leads to action — the recognition that when your government is killing civilians in your name, with your money, you have a responsibility to oppose it. Not because you are to blame for decisions made by generals and presidents, but because silence is the soil in which extremism grows. Every society that has committed atrocities has relied on a silent majority that looked away, made excuses, and told themselves it wasn't their problem.
Some will say I'm drawing a false equivalence. America is a democracy, not a terrorist organization. We have rule of law and a free press. And that's precisely the point. We should be better. We have every tool, every institution, every freedom necessary to hold our government accountable — and we don't use them. A terrorist organization has no internal checks on its violence. We do. We choose not to pull the lever. That doesn't make us better than the extremists we condemn. It makes us less excusable.
When you excuse the choices that reliably result in the mass killing of civilians, you have become an extremist. Not the kind in the movies. Not the kind that is easy to spot. The kind that is hardest to see, because it looks exactly like everyone around you, nodding along, speaking in calm tones, and calling the slaughter of children by its proper bureaucratic name.
There's a quote from Noam Chomsky that keeps echoing in my mind: "Everyone's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's really an easy way: stop participating in it."
That's where it starts. Not with them. With us. Not with guilt, but with the decision to stop making excuses for the inexcusable. To demand that our government pursue diplomacy instead of dominance. To refuse the logic that says some children's lives are an acceptable cost. To stop being the extremists we claim to oppose.
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