I've said this before on another thread, like other world religion with over a billion followers, of course Muslims are not a homogeneous mass, they, like Christians will encompass the full spectrum of fundamentalists, the devout and the peaceful, to those who would describe themselves loosely as followers, but really only pay lip service and those who are atheist in their complete non belief. The worry, as always, are the fundamentalists. When some deranged cleric, Torquemada planted his warped ideas with Queen Isabella of Spain centuries ago, out of that was born a reign of terror, known as the Spanish Inquisition one of the finest examples of mass intolerance not only throughout Catholic Europe but imported to the New World. How many people subscribed to all that torture and martyrdom of hundreds of thousands of innocent people? we could never know but I imagine the populations of the time were held in thrall by absolute fear and terror of being a transgressor themselves and being dragged before one of the many courts set up to try heretics. Moving on to where we are today, the people who have suffered most from the fundamentalist branch of Islam are Muslims themselves, and I have no doubt that the majority have no time for it, but they are in situations where they endanger themselves by sticking their heads above the parapet. Going back a couple of years when ISIS fundamentalists were steamrolling across parts of the Middle East and set up their de facto headquarters in the city of Raqqa, like the Inquisition all those centuries ago, they swept away the easy going, cafe society, as it was from what I read, to replace that with some quasi extreme version of their religion, like the Christian Inquisitors centuries ago whose firebrand version of what they believed and put into practice would have been completely contrary to the teachings of Christ, most notably tolerance. I similarly I imagine there would be many Islamic clerics who would and will be distraught at how their religion was being skewed through a propaganda that was very much at odds with the teachings of
the main tenets of their religion. Theocracies do seem some of the worst of totalitarian societies imo.
Once again, I'm going to say it, given that extreme Islamists have mounted such precise terror campaigns of seismic proportions, far greater than anything the IRA inflicted on us, with thousands of casualties then I don't think such a fear of that occurring again is irrational. Sometimes we get an inkling by way of the terror threat has been upped to critical, but from what I can remember, we the public, only knew about them in the aftermath.
For what it's worth, my own belief is, given where we are these days, are to not go out of our way to inflame tensions. For example, I thought the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, insulting and puerile and quite possibly they shouldn't have been allowed to be published. I know that flies in the face of free speech, and that really should be sacrosanct, but with free speech should come a responsibility not to overtly inflame. Were those ridiculous and insulting etchings ever worth the outcome?
