The challenge for peaceful Muslims
by Minette Marrin
Truth is said to be the first casualty of war; trust is one of the many casualties of terror. If your surgeon or your child’s school assistant or your charity’s youth worker might be a terrorist – as we have seen – whom can you trust: the woman in the scarf at the checkout till? Your bearded GP? The tragedy is that trust is essential to a free and civil society; when trust dies, petty animosities and resentments will swell and civility and civil liberties will shrink.
There was a sad example of this last Thursday on the London Underground in the rush hour. A packed commuter train careered off the rails to the accompaniment of smoke, sparks and bangs. The passengers were thrown from their seats, nearly 40 were injured and it is hardly surprising, perhaps, that a few of them, spotting a dark-skinned man sprinting through their carriage, tried to grab him. They assumed in their panic that he was a terrorist.
The poor man was not hurt; he was lucky, because terror creates mindless violence and in other times, in other places, he would have been lynched. Yet he was innocent. There was no bomb, just an accident. He was just another frightened passenger who happened to look the part of a terrorist in these people’s frenzied imagination. And who can blame them. He might have been one. This will certainly happen again with worse consequences.
The problem is not just that a man or woman might be taken for a Muslim and a terrorist. That is bad enough and divisive. The great majority of law-abiding Muslims feel understandably resentful and fearful about that. What’s probably worse, I suspect, is the growing resentment among nonMuslims about the terrible damage that Islamist terror does to us all and the failure of Muslim families and congregations – I will not speak of so-called community leaders – to do much about it.
Every time a prominent Muslim stands up to say that Islam is a religion of peace and that most Muslims are not terrorists, I feel irritated. Islam clearly means many things to many people, even more so perhaps than Christianity or Judaism, and it is almost meaningless to say that Islam has nothing to do with Islamist terrorism, just as it’s meaningless to say Christianity had nothing to do with the crusades or the inquisition.
...
[and]
British Muslims Becoming Radicalized
A video from MSNBC.
They are just becoming radicalized?!? Ohhh pahleassssssssseeeee, they have been radical since the day of their birth into the ummah...
They just didn't know it yet...
Pertinent Links:
1) The challenge for peaceful Muslims
2) British Muslims Becoming Radicalized
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