I ask that question in all sincerity, after watching this video of Andy McCarthy debating Muslim prison chaplain Dawoud Kringle. Kringle is a jazz musician who looks and sounds less like a radical Imam than he does a high-school guidance counselor trying a bit too hard to be cool.
Then at the 2:50 mark in the video below, Dawoud is asked some questions about the relationship between Islam and terrorism — in particular, whether Hamas is a terrorist organization. He immediately starts waffling like it’s brunchtime in Belgium:
Obviously, with over a billion Muslims in the world, it’s important not to think of them as a monolithic bloc. But it’s also important to have a debate about what “moderate” Islam is. If we label both Imam Feisal — the spiritual leader of the mosque near ground zero — and Dawoud as “moderates” even though they both insist that “Islamic terrorist” is an oxymoron and won’t condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization, then we’re in trouble.
In the meantime, every left-wing organization in the country has bent over backwards to call former terror prosecutor McCarthy an anti-Muslim extremist. What’s wrong with this picture?
There certainly are Muslims who fit a reasonable definition of tolerance and are willing to call a terrorist a terrorist. But those Muslims have been dramatically underrepresented in the media, because that would force a debate about what constitutes “moderate” Islam and shift the debate away from American attitudes.
Again, a CBS poll yesterday showed 71 percent of Americans think the mosque near ground zero is “inappropriate” but that 67 percent of Americans think that the developers have a right to build it. Acknowledging someone has the right to do something you disagree with is the very definition of tolerance.
What we should be talking about are Muslim attitudes. A recent survey by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a project of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, shows that support for terrorism in the Muslim world is a very real problem:
We need to identify the real voices of tolerance in the Muslim world and encourage and defend them in their attempts to repudiate barbarism. Intolerance is a problem for the broader Muslim world, not something Americans should be anguished about.
