MonsieurStat wrote:

"Woodswun" <woodswun@tepidmail.com> wrote in message
news:4GWze.27964$0i3.6458@twister.nyroc.rr.com...

MonsieurStat wrote:

Persecution of Muslims reach record levels after the attacks.

Check some of these headlines:

- Muslim groups fear backlash after London attacks
- Australian Moslems fear backlash after London bombs
- Muslims cower in fear of backlash
- London Blasts.What About British Muslims?
- Canuck Muslims dread backlash
- American Muslims condemn London attacks, ready for backlash
- Muslims shaken, fearful of backlash as after 9/11

Okay ... Muslims are *fearful* of a backlash, but none of them say

been any. I don't see how there can be a claim of a record level of
persecution of Muslims based on those headlines.

*Fear* of persecution is often worse than the persecution itself.
Terrorists' main objective is to create fear in people's hearts. It

that Muslims in Western countries are primary victims of terrorists.
Stat.

[quoting] If It's a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The New York Times
Published: July 8, 2005

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,

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.

That, too, is deeply troubling. The more Western societies -
particularly the big European societies, which have much larger Muslim
populations than America - look on their own Muslims with suspicion,

the more internal tensions this creates, and the more alienated their
already alienated Muslim youth become. This is exactly what Osama bin
Laden dreamed of with 9/11: to create a great gulf between the Muslim
world and the globalizing West.

So this is a critical moment. We must do all we can to limit the
civilizational fallout from this bombing. But this is not going to be
easy. Why? Because unlike after 9/11, there is no obvious, easy target
to retaliate against for bombings like those in London. There are no
obvious terrorist headquarters and training camps in Afghanistan that
we can hit with cruise missiles. The Al Qaeda threat has metastasized
and become franchised. It is no longer vertical, something that we can
punch in the face. It is now horizontal, flat and widely distributed,
operating through the Internet and tiny cells.

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.

What do I mean? I mean that the greatest restraint on human behavior is
never a policeman or a border guard. The greatest restraint on human
behavior is what a culture and a religion deem shameful. It is what the
village and its religious and political elders say is wrong or not
allowed. Many people said Palestinian suicide bombing was the
spontaneous reaction of frustrated Palestinian youth. But when
Palestinians decided that it was in their interest to have a cease-fire
with Israel, those bombings stopped cold. The village said enough was
enough.

The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of
jihadist attacks.

When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel
involving the prophet Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader
of Iran. To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or
religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.

Some Muslim leaders have taken up this challenge. This past week in
Jordan, King Abdullah II hosted an impressive conference in Amman for
moderate Muslim thinkers and clerics who want to take back their faith
from those who have tried to hijack it. But this has to go further and
wider.

The double-decker buses of London and the subways of Paris, as well as
the covered markets of Riyadh, Bali and Cairo, will never be secure as
long as the Muslim village and elders do not take on, delegitimize,
condemn and isolate the extremists in their midst.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company