Muslim moderates not crazy for staying silent.

Mark Steyn makes a good point when he says we shouldn't expect "moderate" Muslims to speak out [if] they live in amongst the killers and thugs OR they see CNN and the BBC [and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal] knuckle under and refuse to publish the "Danish cartoons."

He has these excellent thoughts about the West's response to the Muslim outrages perpetrated in the wake of the publication of the cartoons:

The Danish cartoons story was a test, and the civilized world failed it. . . . .

Many parties have behaved wretchedly in these last few weeks--European commissioners, the British foreign secretary, the U.S. State Department, significant chunks of the incoming Canadian cabinet, the dead-again Christians who lead the United Church of Canada--but the western media have managed to produce a uniquely creepy synthesis of craven capitulation and self-serving pomposity. . . .

. . . But it seems it's one thing to "speak truth to power" when the power's George Bush or John Ashcroft, quite another when it's an Islamist mob coming to burn your building down. . . .

* * * *

. . . In our multicultural society, the best way to get "respect" from others is to despise them; the surest way to have your views boundlessly "tolerated" is to be utterly intolerant of anybody else's. Those who think Islam will apply these lessons only to op-ed cartoons or representations of Mohammed are very foolish.

"Why expect "moderate Muslims" to stand up to the Islamist radicals when our own newspaper editors won't?" By Mark Steyn, Weekly Standard, 3/13/06.