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Comment by mercer | Hacker News Reader

At least here in Holland, many muslims form communities, often centered around cultural and religious centers. These communities tend to have leaders and/or spokespeople. These people can speak on behalf of the community. They are not (necessarily) self-appointed.

In my experience, here, the moderate muslims are often rather quiet, perhaps out of fear. In general, they do not support extremism and fear non-muslim extremist retaliation. They are in a really bad spot, and I sympathize with their situation.

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A Muslim here.

> the moderate muslims are often rather quiet.

Yes we are. But there are a few reasons for that:

1- First, Muslims can't be put in one group, there is 1.6 billion muslims worldwide with hundreds of different views and levels of tolerance.

2- Most of them don't have time or are too busy with their daily life. Think about the % of people who go vote every four years in a democracy. 30% maybe 50% at max vote, the rest can't be bothered because they are busy with their daily problems. Add to that that most Muslims live in a third world country, so they have enough problems already.

3- The first people affected by terrorism in term of body counts and extremism in general are Muslims themselves. Did you know for example that ISIS consider the previous president of egypt (Mursi) who is from the muslim brotherhood to be an infidel who need to be killed.

4- People in Muslim countries are getting numb to all this news reports because they are used to it. I remember when I was a kid watching Arab TV news showing people dying in Palestine and at one time the TV commentator laughed. She then said she was sorry and she didn't mean to laugh at what was happening. Most Arabs/Muslim who care about what's going on the Middle East have already watched too much death to react to it.

5- Some people do want to go to the street and demonstrate against this blood shed but they are not allowed by their local governments. They fear that this could turn in a revolt. Arab spring says hi.

6- There have been hundreds if not thousands of condemnation an protests by muslims all over the world but the media don't cover them much because they don't fit the narrative of evil muslims.

Me as a Muslim I'm ashamed of what is happening and wish this Scumbugs are captured and put to justice. I see to much politic invested in terrorism that I know it's about power not about religion. I also do believe we muslims failed big time to adapt to the 21st century and need to wake up and get our acts together.

I'm really sorry for the families of the victims and I hope they capture the scums who did this.

There was an interesting discussion on reddit about this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rmmx8/el...

> In my experience, here, the moderate muslims are often rather quiet, perhaps out of fear. In general, they do not support extremism and fear non-muslim extremist retaliation. They are in a really bad spot, and I sympathize with their situation.

They're no more quiet than when say a white Christian lunatic (Breivik) shot 77 people to death and injured over 300. The vast majority of them will denounce both acts, but otherwise they're pretty quiet. Which goes for most people, really, none of my non-muslim friends have gone to any demonstrations lately or spoke out publicly. Sure there are people who do it, but that goes for muslims, too. It's not always very well reported, but if you go and look you'll find a shit ton of muslim leaders denounce such attacks, for example today the French Muslim Council called it an "attack on democracy", barbaric, an attack on freedom of the press etc. And you don't really see anyone speak out against those Muslim organisations like CFCM which is said to represent between 3.5 and 5 million muslims in France. And these aren't just formal organisations, they often have deep ties to the community, particularly with direct links to formal networks of all mosques in the country.

I always wonder what it'd really look like. I'm not religious but family is. They look at attacks like these with disgust. But he's not a well known individual, he has no place on TV to 'publicly speak out'. What would that even look like? Public persons tend to speak out against attacks like these without exception. Today the Muslim Mayor of Rotterdam did, and a Muslim member of the Labor party has planned demonstrations with a large Moroccan youth movement coinciding with demonstrations planned in France.

From Wikipedia on Anders Behring Breivik:

>The manifesto states its author is "100 percent Christian",[4] but he is not "excessively religious"[4] and considers himself a "cultural Christian" and a "modern-day crusader".[3][4] His manifesto states "I'm not going to pretend I'm a very religious person, as that would be a lie", calls religion a crutch and a source for drawing mental strength, and says "I've always been very pragmatic and influenced by my secular surroundings and environment." Regarding the term cultural Christian, which he says means preserving European culture, he notes, "It is enough that you are a Christian-agnostic or a Christian-atheist (an atheist who wants to preserve at least the basics of the European Christian cultural legacy...)"[3][182] Furthermore, Breivik stated that "myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God."[3][192] Nevertheless, he stated that he planned to pray to God seeking for his help during his attacks.[193] //

I described myself as a "cultural christian" as a teenager, I was agnostic and acted atheistically (ie not a Christian). He surely means he wants to maintain 'Western' culture rather than allow Islamisation. That's not "Christian", if he were a Christian terrorist the aim of the terror would be to convert people to Christianity or punish them for not being/opposing Christians. He was, according to this, not bothered by any non-Christians as long as they didn't seek to change Western culture.

If Breivik had cried "for Jesus" or said he was "killing those who offended God by opposing Christianity" then the Pope, Archbishops, and other leaders of formalised Christian congregations would have been giving statements against it at the drop of a hat.

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