Originally Posted by FlyerJosh
I don't know if it was a majority. I agree that there were those that were seen on TV in the streets celebrating. However, we really don't know how many people actually support radical groups. IF TV shows thousands of people in the streets, there are generally tens of thousands that didn't come out to celebrate. Shots of "mobs" of crowds can often be deceiving, especially with media spin and ratings always at the forefront.
There were many outraged Muslims that were pouring out emotion for the victims of 9/11.
All that I am saying is that it is dangerous to derive conclusions about an entire group of people or an entire religion based on the actions of small fractions of the population.
I know and have worked with many happy, outgoing, intelligent, friendly, and otherwise socially stable and society-contributing Muslims, and I'm proud to call them friends.
I have spent enough time over there to have a reasonable feel for it. Pre-9/11 I had more freedom and opportunity to experince arab society than most westerners have today due to security issues. There are lots of things I like about it, and I have some friends also who are firmly in the good-guy camp.
I also hate to stereotype, but a VERY large percentage of folks over there have sympathies of varying degrees to the WRONG side in this conflict. How many exactly? Hard to say...it's not easy to quantify something like that, but it has to be around 50%, with a wide margin of error. We are NOT simply confronting a tiny handful of radicals, we are confronting an entire culture and an inseparable religion.
Whatever the solution or solutions to the problem are, we will never find them by sticking our collective head in the sand in regards to the underlying realities of this conflict.