There are ex-Muslims: People like Ibn Warraq, author of "Why I am not a Muslim," who doesn't want an Islamic Reformation so much as he does a Muslim Enlightenment. There are ex-jihadists: people like Tawfik Hamid, who, as a young medical student in Cairo, briefly enlisted in the Gamaa Islamiya terrorist group and who remembers being preached to by a mesmerizing doctor named Ayam al-Zawahiri. . . .

There are even a few practicing Muslims, here, such as the Canadian author Irshad Manji. Ms. Manji, whose documentary "Faith Without Fear" airs on PBS next month, describes herself as a "radical traditionalist" and draws a sharp distinction between Muslim moderates nad reformers: "Moderate Muslims denounce terror that's committed in the name of Islam but they deny that religion has anything to do with it," she says. "Reform-minded Muslims denouce terror that's committed in the name of Islam and acknowledge that our religion is used to inspire it."

A fair bit of U.S. government money is being spent on conference security, including from the FBI. Still, it's remarkable that the government, given the huge resources available from places like the National Endowment for Democracy, provides no funding or support for this conference or its various participants.

Here are two questions for the government: If Mr. Warraq, Dr. Sultan et al. are really irrelevant to the larger Muslim debate, why are the jihadists so eager to kill them? And if the jihadists want to kill them, don't they deserve support as well as security?