Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff Lebowski
So are you intimating moderate Muslims and not extremists are doing these crimes?
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I think it is absolutely fair to say the following:
Moderate Islam, or probably better to say "Mainstream Islam", is not an equivalent to what we normally would consider to be "moderate". The baseline for mainstream views in the Islamic community is what we would consider VERY far from moderate in a typical western liberal secular democracy. There is very good data to support this conclusion.
This is the big gap in understanding and where the confusion lies for many western liberals: we assume that the centre line in Muslim communities (even western ones in Britain and the US) is more or less where we are. It's the famous "relativism" that has ended up doing us a disservice by obscuring important differences between the beliefs of western liberal secularists and the world's muslim population. The is a slightly more difficult point to illustrate using extreme examples like the Nice/Orlando/9-11/Charlie Hebdo attacks. It's more easily illustrated when discussing things like LGBT rights, the criminality of homosexuality, and the fact that homosexuality is a capital crime in some Islamic countries. Gay people don't get thrown off of buildings in Islamic countries because a tiny minority takes that approach. But such laws are enforced in an environment where homosexuality is viewed with intolerance by an enormous majority of the population.
In the case of terrorism in western targets, this phenomenon is translated in a different way. So many western people believe (in a bout of generosity, I assumed), that the Muslim population around the world views the events in Nice with the same horror that we would. Given what we know about other comparables (only one of which I cited above), this appears to be a misplaced viewpoint.