A very well-written column by Michael Moran of MSNBC, “The War We Cannot Fight,” very eloquently ties up some thoughts I’ve been having in recent days.
Read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:
It’s a long article, and there’s a lot more worthwhile there.
The Muslim people are going to be so critical in the success of any effort the West takes post-Sept. 11. If fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden are truly perverting Islam, where is the jihad against them?
I’m sure it isn’t happening because people like al-Qaida are bullies with might and power, against people with shaken wills and not much else.
But just as the West is going to have to muster courage it hasn’t had to draw upon for several decades to win a very long, tough, complex battle here, those many good Muslims in the Middle East are going to have to muster their own courage - and for their own reasons, not for ours. It strikes me that they should almost be more motivated than the United States is. Perhaps they just don’t know it.
I would be very interested in what everybody has to say on the subject - especially Muslim Guy, Tamerlane, and any other Muslims on the boards.
Have Muslim religious leaders done enough to quell this violent fundamentalism in the past (and, in a similar vein, the cultural perversions in the name of Islam that lead to poor treatment of women)?
Realistically, can they make a difference here? How? How would the Islamic, Arabic public respond?
Why are the Islamic voices calling the violent, radical fundamentalist movements a bastardization of the Qu’ran seemingly on the fringes?