Why is it a problem?

Again, the problem we are talking about is this: the prevailing paradigm in the West that axiomatically and persistently separates Islam into two parts:

1) a vast majority of Muslims, who are harmless and peaceful, and who are following a harmless and peaceful Islam;

and

2) a small minority of extremists, who happen to be Muslims but whose extremism has little if anything to do with Islam itself, or with the vast majority of Muslims.

Now, why is this a problem?

Simply put, to the degree that this extremism is a pernicious threat to the West as well as to much of the rest of the non-Muslim world, it becomes critically important for us to assess accurately just how prevalent this extremism is, and to what extent it derives its inspiration, goals and methodology from traditional mainstream Islam.

However, the prevailing paradigm in the West, as featured in our opening paragraph above, generally suppresses the exploration of these most exigent assessments. And since this prevailing paradigm exerts considerable influence and power over our society, the pursuit of a rational analysis of the actual nature and dimensions of a major threat on our civilization remains inordinately hampered.

Nevertheless, a minority of analysts have been going against the politically correct grain by pursuing this rational analysis, and their unfolding labors generally point to a disturbing conclusion—that the prevailing paradigm that always finds Islam itself and the vast majority of Muslims axiomatically harmless and peaceful breaks down under a study of the data about Islam. Their conclusion points to a much larger problem than a mere “small minority of extremists” whose ideology and actions are deemed to be mostly unrelated to Islam itself. For their efforts, this minority of maverick analysts has been generally marginalized by the mainstream media as well as by most representatives of academe and politics. Worse still, these few analysts have been routinely vilified as “Islamophobes” or “bigots” or “racists” or even as purveyors of “genocide”.

Furthermore, this prevailing paradigm provides a ready-made, and constantly renewable format for processing any bad news that comes out of the Muslim world: every time some Muslim or group of Muslims behaves badly in any way (from burning an embassy to blowing up a train), that Muslim or group of Muslims immediately gets put into the slot of the “small minority of extremists”—thereby automatically exonerating Islam itself and the vast majority of Muslims. Often the way this paradigm functions is neatly circular: when, for example, a news report mentioned the fact that, three days prior to the murder of the Catholic nun in Mogadishu, Somalia, on September 18, 2006, a Muslim cleric preached a Friday sermon in a mosque in Mogadishu telling his Muslim congregation, in response to the Pope’s recent lecture that Muslims had found so “insulting”, to go out and kill any Christian they could find, the writer of that news report casually labelled that cleric as a “radical Muslim cleric”. The writer provided no evidence for why that cleric should be labelled a “radical”, and one is reasonably left to assume that the cleric automatically proves himself to be a “radical”—and therefore distinguishable from the majority of allegedly moderate Muslims around him—only by the very fact being reported!

This kind of reflexive circularity that is so common in the West does not so much reflect a rational conclusion about the demographic strata of Islam, as it is a device to avoid—or even to suppress—objective attempts at assessing what the actual statistical breakdown is in the Muslim world between “extremists” and “moderates”. The paradigm must stand, at all costs, and any analysis that begins to threaten it must be marginalized, or even vilified. Obviously, and to repeat ourselves: this becomes a problem when it hinders our ability to process any bad data about Muslims in a rational, objective manner and to go wherever rational interpretations of that data might lead us—and on that basis to begin to formulate pragmatic courses of action to protect our societies against what, to the best of our ability, unhindered by political correctness, we can discern are the actual dangers.

If the conclusions of the minority of politically incorrect analysts are largely correct, our sociopolitical culture, in its continual refusal to relax its politically correct paradigm and allow diverging viewpoints equal time in the public dialogue about the problem of terrorism, is behaving with a reckless irresponsibility that could well contribute to the otherwise avoidable deaths of untold numbers of innocent people in the near future.

Click on the blue text to read Part 3: What is the source of the problem?