It is, indeed, Matt, an important revelation that you were the one to choose the headline for Evan Carp’s Feb. 24 Wespeak, “Question Islamic Radicals.” I completely support your decision to publish Carp’s opinion, but your choice of headline is more significant than you make it seem. First of all, why did you not use the obvious headline, “What’s wrong with the Muslim world” – or, an edited, shorter version, “Question the Muslim World”? It certainly expresses much better what Carp says than the headline you chose, and this is crucial for the following reason: Carp does not use the phrase “Islamic radicals” a single time in his piece. It seems, then, that you projected your own idea of questioning Islamic radicalism, as you express in “The editor’s notebook” in the Feb. 28th issue, onto Carp’s text.
But I do not single this out simply because I consider it to be in poor editorial judgment. It is because, in so doing, you fall even more blatantly into a similar trap as Carp: you are careful to acknowledge your belief that most Muslims are not violent, but you fail to make a crucial distinction between Muslims who have perpetrated violence and those who are Islamic radicals when you suggest that Carp is “angry with the Muslims who have acted violently at various times throughout history, and the political and religious beliefs of these radical Muslims should undoubtedly be questioned.” The difference between “Muslims who have acted violently” and “radical Muslims” is enormous, if only given the charged nature of the word “radical” in a post-9/11 world.
And why are the examples you give of Christian and Jewish religion-based violence from the “last century” and “first century A.D.,” respectively? Surely, you could have mentioned the currently-active Aryan Nations in the U.S. – originally the political wing of the Church of Jesus Christ – who, in an ironic twist of logic, now chooses to openly express its support for violent radical Islamism (check out their website for a scary reality-check). You could have also mentioned the likes of the Brooklyn-born radical Meir Kahane, assassinated in 1990, whose Jewish Defense League (which is now under a different incarnation: www.kahane.org) was formally considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. Department of State; Google his name, and you will find that Kahane’s militant ideology is remarkably similar to that of, say, al-Zarqawi. This is not to diffuse the danger of Islamic radicalism but to put it in perspective; and I doubt that I need to lay out the reasons here for why Islamic radicalism may be more widespread.
Lastly, why did you refer to the KKK as “people who have called themselves Christians” without making a similar qualification in reference to those you call radical Muslims? I am not equating the KKK and “radical Muslims” here, nor do I accuse you of having done so. Rather, this shows an apparent lack of knowledge and familiarity that, it seems to me, allowed you to ignore the difference between violence occurring in an Islamic context and the more particular concept of radical Islam(ism), yet did not prevent you from taking a strong moral stance in a generalizing manner. If you were simply the author of a Wespeak, like myself, I would probably have paid less attention to your line of argument. But you are the Argus’ Editor-in-Chief, which puts a lot of weight on what you write in its pages. And that, for me, raises a lot of concern.
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