I have rarely read anything in the Grey Lady that has baren any relation to reality, but this editorial, by Fred R. Conrad (reg req’d), actually not only makes sense, but does not scream "bleeding heart liberal!"
Yesterday’s bombings in downtown London are profoundly disturbing. In
part, that is because a bombing in our mother country and closest ally,
England, is almost like a bombing in our own country. In part, it’s
because one assault may have involved a suicide bomber, bringing this
terrible jihadist weapon into the heart of a major Western capital.
That would be deeply troubling because open societies depend on trust –
on trusting that the person sitting next to you on the bus or subway is
not wearing dynamite.The attacks are also deeply disturbing because when jihadist bombers
take their madness into the heart of our open societies, our societies
are never again quite as open. Indeed, we all just lost a little
freedom yesterday.But maybe the most important aspect of the
London bombings is this: When jihadist-style bombings happen in Riyadh,
that is a Muslim-Muslim problem. That is a police problem for Saudi
Arabia. But when Al-Qaeda-like bombings come to the London Underground,
that becomes a civilizational problem. Every Muslim living in a Western
society suddenly becomes a suspect, becomes a potential walking bomb.
And when that happens, it means Western countries are going to be
tempted to crack down even harder on their own Muslim populations.-snip-
Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because
there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society,
either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce
its own extremists – if it turns out that they are behind the London
bombings – or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do
it in a rough, crude way – by simply shutting them out, denying them
visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven
innocent.And because I think that would be a disaster, it is
essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a
jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult,
that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect
Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out
that death cult. It takes a village.
Every time I write anything negative in a broad stroke about Muslims, I, on several levels, feel that that is wrong. While a case can certainly be made for the destructive, disgusting tenets of the religion, are they all bad people? Certainly not. But it is hard to tell when they so often are quiet, and seem to go along with what the radical elements of Islam are doing. Sort of like how the more normal Democrats and slightly left of center folks go along with the radical Left elements.
A pirate thong for Fred
