The moderate Muslim.

Read Stephen Schwartz on the moderate Muslim and Western media. Here's an excerpt:

Muslims are not silent in the face of radicalism, extremism, and other ideologies that support terrorism from within the ranks of the Islamic global community, or umma. But Western mainstream media - the MSM - have proven unwilling or incapable of reporting to Western audiences on the personalities embodying the Islamic "counter-jihad," the principles that impel them, or the daily facts of their struggle. When the battle for the mosque is invoked, it is too often done so by commentators who have no idea how this battle shapes up, where its fronts are located, or who represents each trend.

The problem is more that of "MSM silence" than of "Muslim silence." Furthermore, MSM silence about moderate and pluralistic Muslims then filters, or better, refracts through the prejudice of bigots in the media audience, who seek to turn the war against terror into a war against all of Islam. Almost two years ago, on TCSDaily.com, I outlined the basic failure of comprehension in the MSM when faced with the challenge of radical Islam. Ignoring moderate Islam is merely a variation of obliviousness and laziness about radical Islam. In its worst effects, MSM silence about moderate Islam discourages the recruitment of moderates to anti-terrorist activism, but also deters the solidarity of non-Muslims who could otherwise assist moderate Muslims.

There is no more immediate or eloquent example of how these factors affect American public opinion than the recent MSM coverage of the arrests in a terrorist plot to attack Fort Dix, NJ. Four among the six suspects detained in the case turned out to be ethnic Albanians. Certain commentators rushed to declare they were all Albanians from Kosovo, and to reproach them as ungrateful refugees from a war in which the U.S. had intervened to save Muslims. A rage spread through the blogosphere against all Albanians - presumably including Albanian Christians, of whom few onlookers know much, notwithstanding the prominence of the most famous of all modern Albanians, Mother Teresa. It turned out, however, that the three Duka brothers indicted in the conspiracy, Dritan, 28, Shain, 26, and Eljvir, 23, are from the town of Diber in western Macedonia, and not from Kosovo. Nobody in the Western commentariat bothered to apologize to the Kosovar Albanians for their allegations against a whole community, based on supposition, alarmism, and spite.

Furthermore, the Duka brothers had nothing to do with the Kosovo war and refugee influx, but had been brought to the U.S. as small children. While their untrimmed beards appeared a sure marker for their having become adherents of the radical-fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, they did not attend an Albanian mosque in the U.S., but an Arab-Pakistani institution, the South Jersey Islamic Center. As noted in The Washington Post, one member of the congregation declared, "The oldest brother was a funny guy, a joker. But he was not North African or Pakistani, and the language barriers often force us to talk among our own ethnic groups."

Arabs and Pakistanis are, by a far length, the Muslim communities in the West most saturated with fundamentalism. Thus, it took some time for American pundits, or aspirants to that title, to catch up with the dangerous probability that rather than the Fort Dix conspiracy exposing radical Islam among Muslims in the Balkans, it emerged from the underworld created by Wahhabi domination of Sunnism in America. I have repeatedly argued that radical Islamic ideologues have been more successful in imposing conformity on Sunnis in the U.S. and England than in most Muslim countries. Even Saudi Arabia, the source of Wahhabism, is now undergoing mass discontent with the Wahhabi order.

[Muslim] [Islam] [Wahhabi] [Fort Dix] [Albania] [Kosovo] [jihad] [terrorism] [media]