Judeopundit
Irshad Manji, writing in The Austrailian, makes an interesting distinction between “Moderate Muslims” and “Reform-minded Muslims”:
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Moderate Muslims denounce violence in the name of Islam but deny that Islam has anything to do with it. By their denial, moderates abandon the ground of theological interpretation to those with malignant intentions, effectively telling would-be terrorists that they can get away with abuses of power because mainstream Muslims won’t challenge the fanatics with bold, competing interpretations. To do so would be admit that religion is a factor. Moderate Muslims can’t go there.
Reform-minded Muslims say it’s time to admit that Islam’s scripture and history are being exploited. They argue for reinterpretation precisely to put the would-be terrorists on notice that their monopoly is over.
Denial that religion has anything to do with terror is one side of the coin. The other side is that many Moderate Muslims, using a vocabulary of concepts supplied by the Western Left, have embraced the politics of victimhood. And it is not just that Muslims thereby let religious extremism off the hook–political extremism also involves hatred of the West, and religious extremists can recruit among an already enraged population. A recent Al-Ahram editorial (entitled, of all things, “In a state of denial”) presents a wide-spread view of the world divided into the Dar Al-Colonialism and the Dar Al-Victimhood:
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