After reading Sgt Mom’s outstanding post last night, and adding my own rosy commentary, I came across this article in The Daily Standard on the Moroccan approach to relations between Islam and other religions that offers hope. For example:

“Abaddi’s visit to the United States underscores this point: It was part of an ongoing campaign to reach out to religious groups in the United States. One aim is to raise the profile of what he calls the “Moroccan model” of moderate Islam. Evangelical leaders, for example, have been invited to Casablanca for high-level meetings and inter-faith dialogues. In March of this year, the Moroccan government helped sponsor a conference of “Rabbis and Imams for Peace” in Seville.”

I have tried to make sense of this issue for years now; tried to express the conclusions at which I have arrived without coming off as being cut from the same cloth as the Muslims that I have been critical of – more often than not unsuccessfully, I think and particularly with the left. It has been a challenge to reconcile the theme that Muslims-in America-are-not-like-those-zealots-in-Iran-they-just-want-to-live-the-American-dream with the stories about long standing mosques in the U.S. being hijacked by radical imams (I am looking for a link to a series by the Chicago Trib on this topic), and organizations like CAIR that, despite their moderate appearance, are a front for the radical fringe. I have no doubt that the former premise is largely true, but so is the latter. A question that I grapple with is why the moderate multitudes are so silent on the subject; why they do not loudly, openly, and with great frequency disavow the subset of the Muslim belief system that spawns the likes of what we see in the news on a nightly basis. Comments and emails to previous posts on the subject have chastised me for being ignorant of some supposed vocal repudiation, but were absent any sort of citation. To some extent, the print media must take some responsibility, for if they expended as much effort researching the Muslim counterpoint to radicalism as they spend in their attempt to sensationalize the horrible acts of (what I hope to be) the radical minority, perhaps average people like me would not have these questions.

Getting back to Morocco, I think a large part of the problem is that in many nations the Muslim majority is poor and illiterate, and hence easily led by corrupt leaders. I am skeptical that the moderation practiced by Morocco, and hopefully a future Iraq, can turn the tide in the apparent time frame that we have. There are too many people over there both serving and drinking the KoolAid, and too long a history of distrust for the west.

Geez, I started this with an upbeat attitude and end up at the same place. Maybe I need to take a trip to Casablanca. Maybe stop by Rick’s Place. I hear the Nazi’s are gone.

Radar