It’s time to excise the radicals once and for all.
A common complaint you hear these days, especially on the right, is that “moderate” Muslims do nothing to oppose or denounce radical Islam and jihadist terrorism. As a blanket generalization, this is untrue and unfair. If you bother to look, you can easily find examples of this around the world: individual Muslims assisting investigations and lending a hand to victims of terrorism, imams and organizations issuing statements against terrorism, even groups of Muslims bravely standing up for persecuted Christians (such as the Copts in Egypt).
Muslims are often the first targets and victims of the radicals, and even among those who share some of the jihadists’ political beliefs, many would love to see the scourge of Islamist terrorism exterminated. While public polling on extremist attitudes often shows alarmingly large minorities of Muslims holding one or more radical beliefs, they still consistently show majority rejection of most of those beliefs in most countries’ Muslim populations (in both Western countries and majority-Muslim states).
You may be skeptical about the political will behind these sentiments, but the sentiments are there, and the individual actions taken are real. Why, then, do we hear so little about them, and why do they seem to have so little impact? Media narratives and media laziness are a factor, as is the mainstream media’s general difficulty when it comes to intelligently covering sincere religious belief of any stripe. But the media alone is an incomplete answer, especially given how many outlets are so visibly desperate to run stories about how radical Islam isn’t Islam at all, etc., and how eagerly they tend to eat up propaganda from public-relations shops for organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
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