Here's the just-issued report on the Watch List, as it grows like Topsy: 

http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/plus/a0816/final.pdf

Surely the point can be made in a language cats and dogs can understand.

There is an ideology: Islam. Islam inculcates a world-view that posits a state of permanent war, though not necessarily of open  warfare, between Muslims and non-Muslims, Believers and Infidels. The duty of Muslims is to conduct Jihad, and death in the pursuit of Jihad is the surest and fastest way to the Muslim Heaven. Jihad may be defined as the "struggle" to remove all obstacles to the spread, and dominance, of Islam by non-Muslims. In the early centuries, and certainly in the time of Muhammad, Islam could be spread only through qitaal, or combat. Now, however, there are other ways to conduct Jihad. In Western Europe, for example, the presence of large numbers of Muslims allows for the spread of Islam, the increase in its power, and the consequent pressure on the legal and political institutions of the Infidels, has come about through deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest.

The report from the American government about the Watch List of terrorist suspects adds to the impression that  the only worry, however great and growing that worry might be, from the instrument of Terrorism. Economic warfare can be jihad. Attempts to change a nation's laws as to accord with the Shari'a, the Holy Law of Islam,  is a form of Jihad. Attempts to force newspapers and radio and television to carry stories that emphasize the wonderfulness of Islam, and the way in which Muslims fit right in, and anyone who adduces evidence otherwise is subject to all kinds of attack, is a form of Jihad.

Read the bureaucratic blah-blah of the Homeland Security boys. But think of what a tiny part of the problem they are dealing with, and how the very fact of such hypertrophied attention to "Watch Lists" -- both by those who deplore these lists, and by those who support them -- diverts attention from the full meaning, and full menace, of Islam.