Saturday, February 04, 2006

Can Islam Moderate?

Excellent article by Tim Rutten in the LA Times this morning regarding the reaction of the Muslim world to the Danish cartoons. Money quote:
The West's current struggle with a murderous global Sunni Muslim insurgency and the threat of a nuclear-armed theocracy in Iran makes it clear that it's no longer possible to overlook the culture of intolerance, hatred and xenophobia that permeates the Islamic world. The hard work of rooting those things out will have to be done by honest Muslim leaders and intellectuals willing to retrace their tradition's steps and do the intellectual heavy lifting that participation in the modern world requires. They won't be helped, however, if Western governments continue to pander to Islamic sensitivity while looking away from violent Islamic intolerance. They won't be helped by European diplomats and officials who continue to ignore the officially sanctioned hate regularly directed at Jews by the Mideast's government-controlled media, while commiserating with Muslims offended by a few cartoons in the West's free news media.

Read the whole thing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I agree 100% with the author. Naturally our State Department follows suit with a sorry-assed apology to the peaceful followers of Islam (at last count there were about 18 of them}. Why we continue to pander to these idiotic savages is beyond comprehension.