Fischer's framing, "Don't feed the beast" makes me hugely uncomfortable because it is disturbingly close to the neocon battlecry of "Starve the beast", the goal of "shrink[ing] government to a size where we can drown it in a bathtub" (Grover Norquist). I am surprised that Fischer overlooked, or chose to overlook, this association in his first lecture at a US university. But perhaps I am being overly sensitive.  

As to the "war on terror", or the "war on fanaticism", or however we wish to term it (I'll just call it "the gwot"), the problem is not merely the name, but (as others have noted before) the fact that the concept is so vague as to be meaningless (or alternatively, so capable of being arbitrarily applied). This fact has multiple implications; unfortunately, none of them have any relevance to reducing the frequency of fanaticism-motivated attacks.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman