The Islamists could not be more serious, or determined. To be sure, their sabotage campaign exploits the atmosphere of intimidation created by jihadist terror. But their “grand jihad” is mostly a nonviolent affair, marching through our institutions: government, academe, media, the courts, the financial sector — all aspects of society.

That is the conclusion of a group of national security experts that recently released its study “Shariah: The Threat to America.” Modeled on the “Team B” of a generation ago, which questioned the folly of detente as a strategy for dealing with the Soviet threat, the new study takes issue with government’s regnant security policy, premised on the theory that the threat to our way of life comes only from a tiny group of “violent extremists.”

To the contrary, Islamism is a mainstream ideology to which millions of Muslims — only a bare fraction of whom would ever participate in terrorism — are beholden. Islamists and Muslim terrorists agree on the goal: the implementation of Sharia to strangle individual liberty and foster Islamicized societies.