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Monday, September 6, 2004

If Modern Islam is a Peaceful Religion, Where's the Outrage?

Is anyone surprised that there appears to be an al-Qaida connection to the wholesale slaughter of Russian schoolchildren yesterday in Beslan? Presumably, the same is true of other recent terrorist attacks in Russia, notably two recent airliner crashes.

I'm a Mormon, or more properly, I am told, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In fact, I'm a local Church leader. I'm pretty sure that if murderers were blowing up buildings, crashing airliners, and slaughtering schoolchildren in the name of Mormonism, my religion's leaders would be very aggressive in denouncing the murderers and would call for Church members everywhere to do everything in their power to assist the authorities in apprehending the perpetrators and any who assisted them - not just because the evil would discredit the Church and bring reprisals against its members, but because it's a church, and churches are supposed to oppose evil.

We haven't seen much of this sort of outrage in the Muslim community; it's about time we did. At least there's some in the aftermath of the Russian horror; see this AP article at Haaretz.com, an Israeli site. Maybe it helps that the victims there were not Americans.

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