Hamas Takes on the Radicals

Banning parties does not have to mean silencing citizens who are tempted to vote for extremists.

Israeli authorities have provided clear evidence that they will not allow Israeli extremists to prevent the plan from being carried out.

Extremists might still exist, but they would be marginalized, finding few recruits or supporters.

The alternative is to yield to polarization and perpetual confrontation in effect, to allowing the extremists to set the agenda.

Iraq provided the symbols, civilian casualties, and recruiting ground that the jihadi extremists had sought in Afghanistan.

We request the leaders of those countries to deal with that issue urgently in order to stop radicals from taking advantage of the situation and committing abuses against expatriate Haitians.

Equally, it would be a big mistake for Muslim leaders to allow Muslim extremists to make claims on behalf of Muslims worldwide without contest.

Rather than allow extremists to continue to hijack economic policy debates, policymakers must work to bridge competing schools of thought.

Nor is it always the case that mainstream parties can cut off support for extremists by selectively coopting their complaints and demands.

Seizure of a Russian military base in order to acquire weapons is, indeed, likely to become a vital goal of extremists.

So the traditional liberal position in support of giving wide scope to freedom of speech, even for extremists, is losing ground everywhere.

The state must battle terrorism, public space must not be abandoned to extremists, and Islam in Europe must adapt to Europe.

President Dmitri Medvedev, for example, regularly calls for extremists to be burned to ashes, and for terrifyingly broad punishment, including of those washing linen and preparing soup for terrorists.

Instead, Bhutto had to pay with her life for courageously challenging extremists of all stripes from Al Qaeda and Taliban to the country s religious political parties and military hardliners.

An American security umbrella over the Persian Gulf and Israel might calm nerves, but it would do little to counter increased Iranian support of Islamic radicals.

With the outcome of Bush s ill advised war in Iraq uncertain and his legacy depending heavily upon finding a political solution, Iran s support for Iraqi Shiite radicals could give it considerable leverage.

It demands security guarantees for the Serbian minority and cultural monuments, as well as control of the borders with Albania and Macedonia to stop traffic in arms, drugs, and women, and to prevent the use of Kosovo by Albanian extremists.

According to Kommersant, the police said they were checking reports stating that there was an illegal extremist center disguised as a prayer room at the market, which was visited by Muslim traders and Tajik workers from nearby construction sites.

Ceding the immigration debate to extremists has abetted another extraordinary distortion people generally believe that the number of immigrants in their countries is far higher than it actually is.

By contrast, authoritarian regimes repression of civilians, and their non differentiation between civilians and killers, provides extremists with fertile recruiting conditions by discrediting the government in the eyes of a significant part of its population.

I listened to a Sunni engineer whose association with an American construction company makes him a target for extremists, and to a translator of the Christian Mandaean minority who narrowly escaped death when the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was bombed in August 2003.

So the traditional liberal position in support of giving wide scope to freedom of speech, even for extremists, is losing ground everywhere. When it comes to fighting terrorism and the prospect of genocide, the world is now becoming afraid of dangerous words.

India also needs to look inward, as anti Muslim violence in Gujarat and the activities of Hindu fundamentalist groups have potentially created recruitment opportunities for Muslim extremists within India.

Beyond the short term, it would unleash major unintended consequences, potentially including an Iraq style soft partition of Syria and the creation of a haven for extremists stretching across much of Islamist controlled northern Syria and into the Sunni areas of Iraq.