Perhaps you could name a high-profile cold war "communist saboteur" global terrorist leader who told his followers they had a duty to kill non-communists, including women and children, wherever and whenever they could. Perhaps you could identify a series of terrorist outrages perpetrated by this "communist saboteur" terrorist network that murdered tens, hundreds and even thousands of innocent people at a time over the course of a few years. Perhaps you could point to the common knowledge that these terrorists were seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and that such weapons were suddenly far more likely to be available to non-state agents due to the recent collapse of a global superpower and the deliberate establishment of a black market by a high-profile nuclear player (A Q Khan). Because if you could do these things — which, of course, you can’t — you would be able to show that the communist saboteurs in question were in serious danger of being capable of a great deal more than "limited murder and mayhem"; and "the (many, at the time) people who said there was a significant threat from Evil Communist Traitors Who Would If They Could Kill Every One Of Us" would not now look "silly" at all. At least, they wouldn’t look anywhere near as silly as those who currently compare al-Qaeda and associates to the threat from cold-war "fifth columnists" as it actually was.

The remarks of people like DeLay are of course absurd and reprehensible, but no more so than the claim that anyone who takes al-Qaeda seriously must agree with DeLay. The threat posed by al-Qaeda and associates is not diminished in the slightest by the simultaneous existence of other terrorist organisations with more limited aims.