How the moderates get cowed

Robin of Berkeley explains what it is like to live in Berkeley, Calif., which is the "epicenter of the radical Left."

Awhile back, my husband and I were walking around downtown Berkeley with another couple. Suddenly, a deranged person picked up a bottle and threw it at me.

Fortunately, it hit the sidewalk a few inches away, and shattered into a million pieces. By the look of blind fury in the maniac’s eyes, he clearly wished it were me who had shattered instead.

Now I don’t have to tell you that a lot of progressives are crazy--with the Left in charge, you probably figured this out a while back. You may be wondering what rock they crawled out from under. Are they on drugs -- or off their medications? Well, folks--can you imagine walking, working, and driving among them every single day? Now I hasten to add that most Berkeley-ites are law-abiding citizens--though completely deluded into progressive ideology. The nut jobs are in the minority; however, they dominate the scene. Obviously, people who holler and act irrationally, and occasionally violently, capture the public’s attention.

Sadly, the people who long ago lost their marbles--and, perhaps, their souls--run roughshod over the honorable, and I don’t just mean this literally. They scare people into submission. Given the politically correct times we live in, reasonable responses, such as allowing police to intervene, are strictly off-limits.

Berkeley is, in my view, a city under siege. It has been since the 1960s, when the Black Panthers established a reign of terror over law-abiding citizens. Somehow, that behavior became normalized, as though unbalanced people were simply part of the colorful passing show.

This is why the "moderate Muslim" is a myth. It's not that every Muslim is a violent jihadist; clearly this is not so. But they are cowed and browbeaten into submission (if not actually beaten into submission, or just killed) by the Muslims who are violent jihadists. Just like the decent people of Berkeley, the unnumbered Muslims who just want to get on with their own lives have been scared into submission.

I have written about this before. Start with my 9/11/2010 anniversary post.

It really does not matter much whether Islam, per se, is the enemy. The fact is that Islam as a whole is not controlled or much influenced by (mythical?) moderate Muslims. The radicals are driving Islam's train and controlling Islam's agenda. To talk about some golden age of Islam, as if there was a caliphate where everything was unicorns and rainbows, is not relevant in the 21st century.

Islam is what Muslims do. And today Muslims are either trying to kills us, Islamize us, supporting those who are trying to or they are acquiescing to it.

And then there are these two of "15 rules for understanding the Middle East," published in December 2006 by The New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman, who reported for many years from the Middle East.

Rule 6: In the Middle East, the extremists go all the way, and the moderates tend to just go away.

Rule 7: The most oft-used expression by moderate Arab pols is: "We were just about to stand up to the bad guys when you stupid Americans did that stupid thing. Had you stupid Americans not done that stupid thing, we would have stood up, but now it's too late. It's all your fault for being so stupid."

(The original source seems no longer to be online, it's reposted in full here.)