Morton,
It’s PR squish. It allows for western politicians to talk about the the problems of Islam without making political enemies at home. Of course, your implication is correct. The problem is not just the would be suicide bombers and preachers of hatred.
As Mark Steyn brilliant wrote this on the subject:
But in this instance the folks wanting to silence others’ songs would seem to be the Muslims — or “radical Muslims,” as we still say, more in hope than conviction. Another reader sent round a mocking e-mail — “Are you man enough to shoot a nun in the back?” — and was promptly rebuked by one of his female friends: “This is a one-off situation you describe and so you can’t suddenly leap in to tar every Muslim with the same brush: It wasn’t a response from the Muslim world, it was the reaction of one person.”…
If, say, I were to shoot a staffer for The Nation in the back in the name of National Review, you would expect at the very minimum my bosses here to suspend the column at least until I’d been acquitted at trial. If, instead of that, Rich Lowry and Kate O’Beirne were marching through the streets chanting “Behead the enemies of National Review!” and William F. Buckley were to issue a statement offering the publishers of The Nation the choice between conversion to conservatism, paying a poll tax to him, or death, and if it were rumored that Rick Brookhiser, John Derbyshire, and dozens of other “moderate” NR writers strongly disagreed with my decision to shoot the Nation guy but didn’t dare say anything, I think the reasonable person would conclude that the problem is more than just one fringe nutter.
