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"This debate seems to be a tempest in a teapot. The 10-25% of Muslims who are militant and wish to subjugate non-Muslim peoples and culture need to reform their ideology and accept modernity and global diversity or they need to die. The other Muslims are non-combatants in this war on Islamic terror. I just wish this 75% of Muslims would actively criticize their more extreme brothers and sisters for the trail of death and destruction militant Islam is leaving around the globe."

You thought this debate made you do weird stuff?

I am actually quoting Pat Buchanan to prove my point!

The part of your post underlined is the basic gist of this issue, and while I don't believe the number to be as high as 25%, I won't quibble over that because the premise of your post is the same point that I am trying to make.

That, plus the fact that people are using too broad a brush when they say things like "Islam is the enemy". I object to that on several levels actually.

I object to it because it demands that I make a generalization that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt to be untrue. That generalization asks me to upon people who have been my friends for many years as enemies, based on the actions of known-murderers.

I object to it because believing it would force me to believe that hundreds of millions of people who have never done anything to harm anyone, are evil, and are my enemies.

As far as the outcry from Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11, try looking here, at what the media would not give coverage to.

Meanwhile, I will try and listen to the words of Oscar Aria:

"It is essential that justice be done, and it is equally vital that justice not be confused with revenge, for the two are wholly different."

I actually think that 25% is a pretty reasonable figure if you start out from the point that al-Qaeda gets roughly 10-13% support in most Muslim countries, some more (Pakistan, Bangladesh), some less (Turkey, Jordan). Also, somewhere between 98-87% of Saudis support bin Laden and his cause according to most Arab opinion polls.

Of course, there is a rather wide gap between how many Muslims support bin Laden and how many are willing to take up arms to support his cause. Among the Chechens, the number is quite high, while contrastly very few Kuwaitis seem to think that the whole holy war thing is worth losing their air-conditioned yachts along the Persian Gulf.

Additionally, I think that another reason that so many Muslims support bin Laden is that he possesses what I refer to as the "Magneto factor," after the fictional villain in Marvel Comics. Without fleshing out the character, let me just say that one of the reasons that he commands so much support in the fictional world of Marvel is that he is able to tap into deep-rooted fears and hopes within the Muslim population and then focus the emotions such statements arouse into acquiring support or at least tacit approval for his political agenda.

If you listen to all of his videotapes, he clearly tries to paint himself as a kind of an "invisible superpower," a guy who's going to stand up for Muslims worldwide whatever their cause because their own governments are either too corrupt or too despotic to do so. And to a kid living in the slums of Cairo or Islamabad, I'd imagine that that kind of rhetoric sounds pretty damn appealing. It was one of the tactics used by the communists to gain support in Africa during the 1960s and 1970s. More to the point, bin Laden, regardless of his religious credentials, guarantees instant paradise to anybody who kills Americans in his name. This is one of the reasons why I consider whether an individual is a "member" or a "sympathizer" of al-Qaeda to be rather meaningless - it makes no difference when they're pointing the barrel of a gun at you.

Additionally, I think that the other reason that al-Qaeda is such a major threat is that it was basically allowed to grow relatively unhindered between 1993 (when they killed our troops in Somalia) to 2001. You'd be really amazed what you can do in that amount of time, and the Clinton administration bears a great deal of responsibility for not reacting to the threat before al-Qaeda had a chance to establish this kind of elaborate infrastructure rather than leaving it to the Bush administration to deal with afterwards.