Informant38

The phrase "conspiracy theory" became part of the very limited and rudimentary common vocabulary in order to ensure the safety and continuity of conspirators and their conspiracies.
It didn't happen because people suddenly woke up to the fact that there were a bunch of nuts running around seeing plots where there was only normal human fallibility and run-of-the-mill evil. The lid was about to blow off the kettle of intrigue.
The public was inoculated - the phrase was injected into the public blood like a vaccine, to create an anti-body against the increasingly obvious presence of conspiracies all around us.
"Radical Islam" and "Radical Islamists" and other terms in that semantic field are being used in exactly the same way.
It should go without saying that if you are deeply concerned by Radical Islamists, you should first, before anything else stop radicalizing Islamists.
The truth is the people injecting those phrases into the public mind aren't concerned with Islam or Islamists except as obstacles, but they want the public to be, to be terrified of them in fact - so the public will blindly support their campaigns, which have nothing directly to do with responding to Islam or Islamists, and everything to do with radicalizing them.
Taking their land leads to killing the defenders of the land which leads to killing the next generation of defenders, and on and on. This was foreseeable, and it was prepared for.
They happen to be Muslims in the Middle East, in the American West they were indigenous "Indians", in Viet Nam they were the Vietnamese people themselves.
The process of radicalizing isn't about Islam at all, it's about land and people, and their outraged responses to theft, and to extermination.
They're radical because you're killing them - and you're getting us to pay for it, in every sense.