Moderates and Radicals

The SJ-R surprised me the last few days with some controversial editorials by local writers. Today Timothy Parsons-Heather responds to a writer who believes all moderate Muslims should be held responsible for condemning or otherwise policing terrorist elements in their own tradition.

I guess there's nothing unique about people who think that every individual member of a minority group is responsible for representing that entire group. But that doesn't mean it makes any sense. Does every Christian in America have to personally and repeatedly condemn those who bomb abortion clinics, as though all Christians are somehow connected and responsible for that act of domestic terrorism? Of course not. Then why should every Muslim be expected to personally condemn terrorists, as though every Muslim is somehow connected to terrorism?

The topic reminded me of an episode of the TV documentary 30 Days, done by the director of Supersize Me, that tackles the same issue when a Christian from the South is asked to spend 30 days living as a Muslim in Detroit. Its pretty good and I even found it for rent at Family Video.

Today's editorial repeatedly asks where the moderates were when Americans committed genocide against Native-Americans, perpetuated slavery, and persecuted other minority groups. Of course the answer is that the moderates were doing and saying nothing until the tail end of the struggle to stop all of those injustices.

Martin Luther King addressed this topic well in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

In the struggles for abolition of slavery, civil rights, unions, expanding the the right to vote, womens rights and so many other advances in America, conservatives sat in opposition while the early advocates of those values we all accept today were dismissed as radicals, extremists, communists, anarchists and liberals.

Throughout American history a conservative or moderate can be defined as someone who accepts most of what radical leftists were advocating 30 years in the past. It always has been and always will be that way, which is why I don't mind if someone calls me a liberal.