
Nacera Saoudi (BBC)
In this BBC piece (thanks to nevermindlv), the fault lies not with Islamic terrorists, but with those who hunt them — as the French Muslim Nacera Saoudi says:
“We feel as if we’re being pointed out as the guilty ones – even we Muslim people living here in France feel as if we are somehow held responsible for the climate of insecurity which prevails in much of the West now,” she tells me.
But then there’s this:
And for moderate Muslims in France, Nacera admits, there is an added fear – that more fundamentalist forms of Islam are seeking a foothold here, and often finding it among younger Muslims in the smaller mosques.
“Ten or 15 years ago, we were living a peaceful form of Islam in France, and all of a sudden foreign influences came in and are changing things. Imams are coming from Afghanistan or Pakistan, going in to the little mosques in Marseilles, preaching another Islam, an Islam we didn’t know before,” she says.
She has stopped going to the mosque where she used to worship, because of what she saw as the radical message being preached there. But Nacera says that most Muslims in France want and try to integrate, and it is only a tiny minority which is listening to that new, often anti-Western message.
Well, all right. Then why doesn’t the Vast Majority rise up and cast out, and turn in to the police, the Tiny Minority? If it’s really a tiny minority, how did it get control of her mosque and others? If she is really moderate and really loves France, is it really enough just to stop going there? Wouldn’t it be a sign of her true loyalties and good will to alert French authorities to what is going on there, instead of doing nothing but complain about those very anti-terror efforts? Even granting that French anti-terror efforts are excessive and scapegoat innocent Muslims, it would seem that she would have an opportunity to carve out a third way and demonstrate the French allegiance of this alleged vast majority of moderates. But it ain’t happening.