by Robert Borneman

Created on: April 25, 2008

If you look back through history at similar events, you can see that more often than not, a group fighting for change will obtain it's goal, it just takes much longer than people in this generation are willing to wait.

Look at the equality rights for blacks passed here in the US in the mid 1960's. Black people in America were treated unequally for over 200 years. But after a long period of obvious discontent and anger, African Americans started to rise against the forces holding them back...and as a few leaders emerged to take the reigns, rights for blacks such as voting and equal schooling became only a matter of time. Women's rights are much the same story. Only that it took even longer for women to obtain their rights. But, once again, as pro-womens rights advocates rose up and became more popular, so did their movement.

As discontent among the 'ordinary Muslims' grows, and with it contempt for the extremists, hopefully some outspoken leaders of the majority of Muslims will step up and speak out against the extremists. Speaking out against terrorism alone will not stop terrorist actions, but it will at least bring more and more attention to the issue, and let the extremists know they have another enemy.

It's hard to say how the extremist Muslims would react to a stronger movement against them. We know that violence is not working, at least not how we intended. While we are killing off many terrorists, we are not changing their mindset. As long as even one extremist has the idea to commit terrorist acts, they will continue to bring up the following generations on the same ideals as much as they can. Another problem could possibly be that, like bullies, the terrorists could feed off of the negative press and speeches against them. This very well could be the case as these extremists are filled with religious ideas, more than likely teaching them that anybody speaking out against them is evil and should be murdered. If this is true, so called 'ordinary Muslims' would only be fueling the fire.

It seems logical that like many movements, if the majority of Muslims begin standing up and speaking out against extremist activities, that eventually the movement will have an impact. However, we must be careful to make sure it does not backfire in the form of more attacks.

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