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Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall
Hell, maybe we just have a different idea of what a moderate muslim is.
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I think this is right. I have been talking about moderate muslims in Western countries, and whether they should be expected to denounce Islamist acts of violence, as people other than you have suggested. When I talk about moderate Muslims, I am thinking of the sort of people described
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Greater Paris has about 1.5m nominal Muslims, more than any other EU city. Over the years we have come into contact with a lot of them. Fatima from the Comoros Islands, a tiny headscarfed childminder at our local crèche, became the personal protector of our most anxious child. Nowadays, most Wednesdays I watch our kids’ football practice with a west African Muslim dad. He and the coach, Mehdi — presumably a nominal Muslim — are helping my daughter in her (often literal) battle for acceptance in a boys’ team. I tell these stories to American friends and relatives when they forward me emails about fundamentalist Islam’s supposed conquest of France. ...
About five jihadis attacked Charlie Hebdo. Some 1,000 French Muslims have been involved in jihad in Iraq and Syria. That leaves perhaps 5m nominal French Muslims with more banal ambitions: a decent job, a nice apartment and something good on TV after dinner. Two people killed on Wednesday were nominal Muslims who had been helping keep Paris ticking over: Mustapha Ourrad, subeditor at Charlie Hebdo, and Ahmed Merabet, the policeman gunned down on the street while begging for mercy.
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If you are talking about Muslims and laws in places like Egypt and Indonesia, then we're talking about different things.
If you are saying that we all would be safer if moderate Muslims had less tolerance for extremism than they do now, I agree. But if we're talking about the sort of moderate Muslims I am talking about, I don't think it'll make much difference, because I don't think there's much tolerance for extremism there to start with, and I don't think extremists like the ones in Paris this week and Boston two marathons ago depend much on support from the community. But I don't think we disagree much about that.
