Bring on the apologists of Islam - to the great dismay of much of the liberal intellectual elite the Boston bombers were not the spawn of the Tea Party - so let the rationalizations ring out! Look, all religions are cults to one degree or another and therefore all have the capacity for annoying the hell out of a person like me [or maybe that should read annoy the hell into a person like me - I dunno] - but aside from my dyspeptic grumpiness fact remains that all exclusionary ideologies tend towards extremism and a closed state - they have to in order to protect fragile beliefs and tenets - moral and epistemological absolutism becomes an existential imperative - and all religions are more or less exclusionary and extreme.
And so it is the rationalization that the fanaticism of the Boston bombers is not representative of Muslims in general is meaningless to me regardless of it being obviously true. When it comes to extreme idelogies the power does not belong to the people, it belongs to the people who control the people - that is why it's utterly meaningless if most Muslims do not hate the West, do not hate America - I'm sure most Chinese weren't thrilled by Maoism and most Russians were not head over heels sold on the putative glories of Soviet styled socialism - didn't matter one little bit - without an exogenous force working to moderate Islam the way democracy, free speech, intellectual latitude and open markets came to moderate Christian sects [and remember that Christianity, in sharp distinction from Islam, was from its beginning always conceived of as being separate from the state, of being private and personal, and therefore was much less prone to a suffocating absolutism - there is no equivlent in Islam to Christ's call to 'render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's' - this is an extremely important distinction - Islam was always dependent on state practices and orientation, Christianity wasn't] - without the advance of a moderating influence or power that opens Muslim polities Islam will continue to pose a threat to the West because the openness of the West will continue to pose a threat to the people who control the people in the Muslim world. We don't have to be at war with them, but it's likely we will be regardless to one degree or another and so ongoing wariness, vigilance and caution are called for - anything else would be to indulge a naive foolishness.
