Moderates rally against IS

[Thumpalumpacus]

So, when they don't protest, they get accused of supporting the extremists, but when they do protest, it gets waved away as meaningless? Am I reading y'all correctly?

Okay, it's not TOTALLY meaningless. It may have some short-term benefit at making terrorists think twice. But it's only going to have a minor effect, at the margins. It doesn't create a counter-narrative, and hence it doesn't solve the core problem.

I don't think anyone said that this was a solution. But I think it should be lauded.

To often, statements from Muslim clerics decrying terrorism get overlooked by the media ... only to have critics argue that the silence of moderates is damning, when in fact they weren't silent; they were ignored.

I don't think this, or any other, expression of dismay at violent Islam by moderate Muslims will make the terrorists do anything but mark moderates down for special treatment. It seems to me almost definitional that extremists don't give a shit what anyone, especially moderates, say.

The benefit of activity like this is that it shows the non-Muslim world that there are Muslims who reject the idea violent conversion or conquest. I hope there's more of it.

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What do you think an extremist has to say about those who criticize their actions from within the faith? Could it be that they are "not true" whatevers? Traitors.......part of the problem. They become yet more proof that the western world is evil, because you just know, somehow, that those muslims are "westernized".

This same dynamic can be seen in the actions of the Bolsheviks immediately after the Russian Revolution. The first people they sent into the GULag Archipelago weren't capitalist pigs, but fellow liberals and leftists that didn't accept Bolshevism, like the SRs, the anarcho-syndicalists, etc.