Are there Moderate Muslims?

One of the major issues of recent times has dealt with the Muslim response to terror. People of good conscience have tried to reconcile the actions of Muslim fundamentalists with Islam. There has been a push to try and find those who would speak out against the radicals.

It seems inconceivable that all Muslims would agree with the actions of the terrorists and some would say that we have been moving to a war of "East against West." And you might argue that people like Osama Bin Laden want that. They want the Muslim world to decide that the rest of the world is against them in the hope that this will lead to his goal of restoring the Islamic Caliphate.

I have long argued that although I believe that Moderate Muslims exist, they have allowed the radicals to co-opt their religion and that until they begin to speak out in numbers there would be a stain upon Islam. Finally we see some speech that comes close to this.

The link above will take you to an article by Abdel Rahman al-Rashed. He is the General Manager of Al- Arabiya news channel.

Here are some excerpts that I found interesting:

"We can't call those who take schoolchildren as hostages our own.

We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians, explode buses; we cannot accept them as related to us, whatever the sufferings they claim to justify their criminal deeds. These are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image.

We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.

We cannot redeem our extremist youths, who commit all these heinous crimes, without confronting the Sheikhs who thought it ennobling to re-invent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people's sons and daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American schools and colleges."

Very strong words that I hope will resonate within the Muslim world. They are people like us and given to human failings as we are, but not all of us strap on bombs and murder people. A way must be found to end this practice.