Islam and terrorism
A mostly uninteresting AP piece on
Hispanics who embrace Islam ends with the tired "
Islam does not condone terrorism."
Eric Raymond provides the counterpoint, writing on
The Mirage of Moderate Islam:
The Koran really does endorse suicidal martyrdom and the indiscriminate killing of infidels for the faith. [...]
For both shallow diplomatic/political reasons and deeper psychological ones, Westerners have trouble grasping just how bloody-minded, intolerant, and prone to periodic murderous outbreaks of fundamentalist zeal Islam actually is. But we must come to grips with this. If we treat the terror war as a merely geopolitical conflict, we will be fighting the wrong battle with the wrong weapons.
Razib's input: My family is Muslim-and my father would sometimes get excoriated at dinner parties thrown by friends from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India who were Muslim because he held the liberal position that secular democracy is preferable to theocratic dictatorship if one had to pick. Of course, all these educated doctors, professors and engineers with their American education would prefer a democracy-just a theocratic one. A common sentiment (echoed by my ostensibly liberal father) was to disagree with the methods of the terrorists-but admire their principle and agree with their ultimate aims of purging sin from the world. Even if the majority of the world's Muslims aren't fundamentalists-in the end they don't have a religious case against Islamic extremism that will give them any spine to stand up to those who feel their righteousness in their veins.
Razib-again: Check out this Daniel Pipes
article on the "moderate" Muslims in the US. Pipes has been accused to playing fast and loose with facts, but I buy the general thrust of his thesis-that Islamists (as opposed to Muslims) are a threat to the West and must be excluded from the circle of multiculturalism.