Allow me to throw my two cents in here that the term 'moderate muslim' is a misleading atrocity and should be stricken from public discourse.

My argument is that the term 'moderate muslim' has no relationship to how muslims themselves see the world, see themselves or see each other.

As used, it is simply a western concept, and a misleading one at that.

In our society, a 'moderate' is a person who endorses a given set of social and political values between relatively well understood poles termed left and right.

In Muslim societies, the political options are such that 'left and right' are mostly meaningless. Muslim societies confront a number of political constituencies and methods of government.

If Europe and the West have settled down into 'Liberal Democracy', Islam is a hothouse of divergent social experiments - Monarchies, Aristocracies, Oligarchies of all sorts, Quasi-Socialist tyrannies, Hereditary Dictatorships, Charismatic dictatorships, Military autocracies, Tribal confederacies, Theocracies, Quasi-Theocracies and even Democracies.

Muslim societies wrestle with issues of religion, of traditional lives and livelihoods, of administration of vast wealth, wrestling with grinding poverty, some of them have gigantic non-citizen immigrant worker classes, others are multicultural melanges, they wrestle with economic modernisation, political and infrastructural modernisation, developmental gaps, etc.

Where do you put a Saddam Hussein or the Shah of Iran on the spectrum of left to right? Both were western influenced militarists, who adopted and incorporated western dress, modes of thought, certain kinds of civil rights, and government involvement in the economy. Leftists? Reformers? Progressives? On the other hand, both opposed Democracy and undermined Democratic institutions, favoured and catered a ruling class, dealt with tribes, restricted the media, and maintained secret police. Fascists? Communists?

And yet, both were seen as 'Moderate Muslims.'

In fact, it gets more complicated. Saddam was for a time a 'moderate muslim', but then he got into trouble, fell out of favour, and became a tyrannical bad radical muslim... without his actually changing in any significant way.

Muammar Quadaffi makes the same journey, but in reverse, from radical to moderate, again without any internal change.

Meanwhile, we have the Saudi Royal ruling family. Where do they fit on left to right. Are they, with their elaborate social welfare state and intervention in the economy and society left wingers. Or does their traditional approach to governance make them right wing.

Is a traditional monarch (Saud or Kuwait) more or less right or left than a hereditary dictator (Pahlavi of Iran, Assad of Syria), or a single dictator (Saddam or Quaddaffi)?

And if we can't score them in a conventional ideological sense in western terms, what then does 'moderate' mean?

I'd argue that the traditional use of the term 'moderate' has been shorthand for 'pro-western.'

Thus, any Muslim who caters to American or Western interests is a 'moderate'. Any who does not is a radical.

But in Muslim terms, this is meaningless. They're guided by their own politics, their own lives. The orientation to the west is only tangential. They don't sit around debating with each other what the proper approach to America is. America is a distant thing.

What they debate is how to run their countries, deal with their neighbors, how to get their economies going, etc. Their debates are about themselves.

The result is that a Muslim can in our eyes go from 'moderate' to 'radical' to back again, without ever changing his ideas, his politics, his relationships. It's entirely based on how we assess him in relationship to us. But that relationship does not drive his politics.

Thus 'moderate' becomes an entirely fictional term, utterly arbitrary in terms of describing muslims in their lives, and misleading in that it reflects only our own self absorption.

As you can see, Etzioni proves my point by defining 'moderate' Muslims solely by how he perceives them as conforming to Western interests.

Without 'insurgency' Lebanon would have had no remedy or defense against Israel, no one would have ever heard of the Palestinians and Arab nationalists would have had no way to resist the United States in Iraq.

It's certainly in western, Israeli and American interests to have muslims renounce insurgency or terrorism. And thus Etzioni chooses to define those who do as 'moderate.'

As for 'invasion of other nations', once again, Etzioni's bias is showing. Clearly he's wagging his finger on behalf of Israel and singling out Saddam's little escapades. But he's happily overlooking Israel's own little colonial adventures.

Easy to suggest that the moderate Muslims Etzioni seeks are essentially the entire population of Islam.

Let's add the known terrorist Wahabs (Al Qaeda), maybe a few hundred or thousand, to some Hezbollah members, maybe another ten thousand, (being generous), and what the hell, throw in those fearsome Revolutionary Guards in Iran, at maybe another ten or twenty thousand. We have at worst perhaps thirty thousand Muslims that really don't like us, or Israelis.

Divide that by 1.6 billion. The result is 1/1000 of one percent of Muslims are a problem, maybe. How's the crime rate in the Professor's neighborhood?

Now we compare our armed forces combined with NATO troops and I'd say Christianity (more people worldwide) is way more dangerous to Islam than vice versa.

Re-read the column but substitute the word "Christian" every time it says "Muslim."

I personally am sick and tired of the term "moderate." I am not moderate. I am trying very hard to be a fervent Muslim, inshallah. Which means that I support a vision of world where there is no compulsion in religion, as the Quran teaches (along with teaching that good Christians, good Jews, and others as well will see Paradise-- do other faiths teach such an ecumenical view?); where a vision of different communities living in harmony and acceptance of diverse approaches to various isuses is accepted, as the Quran teaches,and on and on. A vision of peace, not war.

Maybe what we need are more "moderate" Christians and Jews. To stop shoving themselves into others' faces. To stop creating and supporting dictators and absolute monarchs in countries that were doing just fine creating their own versions of democracy (remember Iran before 1953?) To stop terror bombing innoncent people (or, to put it the other way, the car bomb is just the poor man's air force-- and the air force is much worse). To stop creating mass prisons and bantustans, like Gaza and the checkerboard insanity of the West Bank. To stop stealing land and resources with the connivance of local elites.

But instead, we like to talk about getting those poor benighted Muslims straighened out. They are only "terrorists" because they have a twisted religion, or that is the easy story line to comfort ourselves with.

When that man bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, no one called him a Christian terrorist, though he explicitly connected himself to some sort of supposedly Christian church movement.

Not too long ago, if a thriller writer wanted a stock terrorist, he did not choose an "Islamic" terrorist but someone from the IRA. But that was not nearly as much fun as condemning the "Islamic terrorists" because while you denounced IRA tactics you also had to discuss legitimate grievances that the Catholic community of Ulster had. (Yet they were never called "Catholic" terrorists, were they?) But now we don't have to do that. We can just call them a bunch of crazy Muslims and ignore the actual source of the anger and alienation that leads to violence.

We talk about "Islamic" terrorists so we can pretend it is about religion in some way. We can say, oh, it is not the religion, but an extremist perversion of it that is the problem,so we are no haters of all 1.6 billion. But still, the label provides an excuse not to confront the real causes of the movements that we label terrorist.

Dear Prof Etzioni,

The problem with the minds at Commentary is that they are stuck on Plato when they need theology to read the issue properly.

Islam has a hardware problem in that the Koran is an immaculate document issued from the mind of "god", whereas the Torah and the Chirstian Bible are from a revealed God that works through men to communicate. As such the Judeo Christian interpretation of existance is always open to change as the vehicle for the transmission, men, is fallable; a later age can always add insight to what was known and seen before. You can see this in the evolution of Jewish and Christian teachings and morality through the ages, it evolves hopefully towards God.
Such evolution is impossible in Islam and thus those Sura's that are the most out of place in the modern world continue to hold force, immutable to reinterpretation.

Secondly, a profound reformation has been taking place in the Islamic world since Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab proposed a return to the texts of Islam and their most direct obedience. His fateful alliance with the house of Saud has given a solide wealthy base to spread a most fundamental interpretation of Islam to all corners of the Islamic World. I can promise you there will be no abrogation of the War Sura as long as one follower of Wahhab has a voice.

Finally I would encourage all people to read the Koran and the Hadith and to think carefully of the consequences the ideas contained in these documents hold for mankind. What does it mean that Mohammed ordered a massacre of those who defied him? What does it mean that Mohammed killed the poets? What is required of a 'good' muslim? These are things that we need to consider seriously and clearly without trying to fit everything into our old categories of left right moderate extreme etc...

Nothing is impossible in this world and there are examples, such as the sufi or the ismalis that offer hope for a peaceful coexistance between people, but there is a massive theological roadblock on the road to harmony and we should discuss this honestly and openly.