To your question though, the French resistance during the second world war could easily have been called terrorists, as could the American revolutionary army.
To your question though, the French resistance during the second world war could easily have been called terrorists, as could the American revolutionary army.
It's absolutely not inconsistent to hold the view that Islamically-inspired terror is a big problem for the world, whilst simultaneously holding the view that the vast majority of muslims are peaceful. I don't know why anyone would think otherwise.
A vocal and deplorable minority of Muslims are actively attempted to split the world into Us and Them, I don't see that playing into their hand and deciding that I'm going to declare all Muslims want me dead is really going to help matters.
Nobody in this thread has suggested this
> ... declare all Muslims want me dead ...
nor this.
I think one of the major issues is defining peaceful and non-violent. From my personal experience (I am from a Muslim country), I have seen many Muslims who would not commit violence themselves, but they do not have any trouble if some extremists commit violence. Some would even give moral justification of the violence. In our country's atheist community we commonly joke "Extremists want to kill us, Moderates want Extremists to kill us". FWIW, apostasy is punishable by death in some Muslim countries.
To sum up, almost all the Muslims are non-violent, but how many of them are truly peaceful? You will be very surprised to know the number.
- Vietnam
- Cambodia
- Ghana
- Iraq
- Afghanistan
The list is endless, you can keep that going for a long long time before you run out of names.