quote:
That so often, man-or-woman-on-the-street Muslims, or "moderate" Muslims, so often voice belief in the same violent ideology as the radicalists.

Whether the man on the street Muslim would do the violence him/her-self, I find it bone-chilling that he/she approves of it. And I think it's with a twisted sense of "fairness" that the media tends to portray Muslims as less favorable on average to violence than they truly are.
I think that ties into the umma concept I talked about before. Muslims see their co-religionists under siege, in Chechnya, the Balkans, Palestine, eastern Turkistan (western China), and between India and Pakistan.

They emphathise with their fellow Muslims' struggles. They approve of the "freedom fighting", in the same way many American approved of the IRA's atrocious activities in Northern Ireland. (Many English people will never forgive the IRA for killing Lord Mountbatten. And who supplied the money for those bombs? Irish-Americans in Boston and New York.)

But would those moderate Muslims take up guns themselves? No, aside from the hardcore muhajadeen who kicked the Soviets out of Afghanistan, and who keep popping up all over the place.