Paula Drennan wrote:

> asalamualaikum, Thank you for your defense of Islam. Every day i go out I
> have to face the stares and cruel words of people who don't understand that
> muslims are not all like al-qaeda, we are not all hell bent on misusing the
> word of Allah to rationalize hatred.

I would observe that there is little condemnation and less action in
the Islamic community against the fundamentalists and their acts.

The group that took down the World Trade Center met in mosques with
clerics who obviously supported them. It's rather difficult looking in
from the outside at Islam to accept that it's essentially a peaceful
belief set when there can be a price put on a writer's head for
publishing things clerics don't like, when there can be the idea of a
holy war in which there are no innocents, when suicide is considered a
rational course of action not to improve anything but to merely
destroy, and when there are apparently so many eager to kill with more
being trained each day. Perhaps they don't act and speak for the
majority, but their actions go unremarked and unpunished within the
community. The larger community gives tacit approval by inertia.

With all the oil money in the Islamic nations, why are there still
refugee camps? Why are there so few schools for the general populace?

To be sure, many of the ideas in the Quran are different than the
behavior of the extremists, but believers would seem to have an
obligation to the belief to right these obvious wrongs. Timothy McVey
was found, arrested, tried, jailed and executed for his part in the
Oklahoma City bombing. Others are right behind him for their parts in
the whole situation. I don't see that sort of activity in the Islamic
nations. The Saudis are finally angry enough to make gestures against
terrorists in the face of the stunning irony of their support of the
groups all these years.

The extremists have government support and shelter in too many
countries. These are governments ostensibly established under Islamic
law. They observe the laws of tooth and claw, not civilization. The
further irony is that civilization as we know it began in the Tigris
and Euphrates valleys, Iraq, and spread through the middle east to the
rest of the western world. They have forgotten their roots and their
central beliefs. Education and thinking have been the worst casualties
in this centuries-long decline. Islam appears to be in eclipse except
as a breeding ground for ignorance, destruction, and passivity against
evil. Where are the builders? Where are the great thinkers? Where are
the creators of a better world? Where are the visionaries?

Pastorio