Thomas Friedman, in his column in today’s Times, notes the usual silence from the world’s “moderate” Muslims in the wake of yet another despicable act of mass murder in the name of their religion.
We read:
On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?
Mr. Friedman imagines a powerful counterfactual:
After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son ”” purely because they were Sunni Muslims ”” where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.
Indeed it would. Read his essay here.
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