On June 12th, Omar Mateen stormed into a gay nightclub with a semiautomatic rifle, killing 49 people and injuring 53 more. It was the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, the most deadly mass shooting in American history, and the most deadly attack on LGBTQ+ people in American history.

This is an incredibly complicated event with a myriad of conflicting, confusing, and often unsubstantiated claims surrounding it. Various reports have claimed that Mateen was racist, homophobic, gay, a radical Muslim, not Muslim at all, and an abuser. People claiming to be eyewitnesses have given a variety of contradictory accounts, including reports that there were multiple shooters or that Mateen had frequented the club before. Despite these discrepancies, there are some confirmed and relevant facts to the case, one of them being that both before and during the attack, Mateen stated his allegiance to ISIL, a radical jihadist militant group responsible for terrorist attacks across the world.

The CIA has since declared that they could find no connection between ISIL and Mateen. Such a statement is, in my view, absurd and completely missing the point. It doesn’t matter if Mateen had been formally recruited into ISIL or not. He had a clear connection: the ISIL sentiments that he parroted on social media and the allegiance he declared on a 911 call during the shooting. ISIL is not just an organization. It is an idea-- and it is after engaging with that idea that Omar Mateen decided to mass slaughter innocent civilians.

Mateen’s ISIL connections have led to a predictably partisan split. Liberals are denying that these connections have any relevance, claiming that Mateen is not a true Muslim, and writing article after article reminding us that not all Muslims are evil. Conservatives are expressing outrage over Liberal hypocrisy, blaming Obama’s “soft” stance on Islamic extremism, and using this as an example of why Americans should be suspicious of Muslims, particularly immigrants.

It’s hard to say anything right now without being sorted into one extreme or another. I tend to err to the Liberal side, because this extreme frightens me less than the other. History is chock-full of people and states doing stupid, hateful things out of fear, and a lot of Conservative rhetoric right now feels dangerously close to forming un-American activities committees and setting up internment camps. But, call me crazy, I think that a more nuanced view is possible.

We should be able to acknowledge that Islamic extremism is a problem in the U.S. and the world without blaming or harming the vast numbers of non-extremist Muslims. Treating all Muslims as The Enemy will achieve nothing and result in the persecution of a lot of innocent people, but refusing to acknowledge Islamic extremism for what it is makes the problem impossible to solve.

It is no coincidence that the two worst terrorist strikes in the U.S. in the 21st century were committed by Islamic extremists. It is no coincidence that all of the most major Islamic extremist attacks in the U.S.-- Orlando, San Bernardino, Boston, 9/11-- were perpetrated by people or groups with ties to Wahhabism, the brand of harsh fundamentalism proliferated by our dear friend Saudi Arabia.

This is not a problem that can be solved by turning away refugees, attempting to ban an entire religion, or bombing the Middle East to kingdom come. Islamic extremists recruit American citizens, and they thrive off of our bad image in the Middle East. Every bomb we drop is another vote in their favor. These are simple-minded, cruel, fear-based answers to a deeply complex problem. Abandoning our principles and morals will do nothing to curb extremist sentiment.

On the other hand, it’s also not a problem that can be solved by closing our eyes and pretending it’s not there. Islamic extremism won’t go away if we just pretend really hard that it doesn’t exist. The first step to solving any problem is understanding it, and we can’t understand ISIL or organizations like it while ignoring what that first I stands for.

Whatever side you count yourself on, charging to the outer edges will help no one. Now is a time for centrism, unity, and compromise. Now is a time to honestly and unemotionally face the facts. Our answer to extremism cannot be extremism.