A rare kudos for the NYT editorial page

It is a rare event indeed when I recommend the New York Times to anyone, so you should pay attention when I do. Today is such a day. Tom Friedman has an excellent column on something to which I have alluded a couple of times since yesterday...the role which Muslims themselves must take on if Islamic terrorism is to be stopped without Muslims in general becoming totally ostracized from open western culture. Says Friedman:

Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent.

And because I think that would be a disaster, it is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult.

Friedman is absolutely right. He also makes this very salient point, which hardly makes one optomistic that Friedman's call might be heeded.

When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel involving the prophet Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.

Ponder on the implications of that for a while.

(Thanks to Ray S for the tip)