Moderate Moslem Watch

Claire Berlinski writes about a new series, Moderate Moslem Watch, will now be a regular feature on Ricochet.

In the course of mentioning it, Berlinski offers her position on the issue of moderate Muslims. Here are some of the points she makes:

• Yes, there are a lot of Moslems who are moderate, in the sense that they are not implacably hostile to the West, not remotely interested in undertaking activities that threaten Western security or constitutional democracy, nor in fact particularly political at all. In many cases, Moslems who are superficially hostile to the West are not lost causes: The hostility is cosmetic, or fashionable; it goes no deeper than many Americans' vague distaste for the French, and could turn around quite easily upon greater knowledge of, and exposure to, the attractive aspects of Western culture and political life.
  
  
• That said, many Moslems (politicians, academics, clerics) believed by the West to be “moderate” are in fact our enemy. They are also the enemies of moderate Moslems. They know and understand the West far better than we know and understand them, and they are winning the propaganda war—winning the war, generally.
  
  
• It is as inaccurate and dangerous to US foreign policy to believe that there are no peaceful Moslems as it is to believe that there are only peaceful Moslems. I’ve been living in an Islamizing Europe and in the Islamic world for about twenty years. When told—as I sometimes am—that Islam is inherently so warlike that we have no hope of doing business with the Islamic world, I know immediately that I’m talking to someone who has never set foot in the Islamic world. Likewise, the moment someone assures me that Islam is always a religion of peace, I know I’m dealing with someone who is either completely inexperienced of this region or an outright propagandist.

Read the whole thing.

It sounds like a balanced approach to identifying something that some people are convinced does not even exist.

Technorati Tag: Moderate Muslims.