Dan McLaughlin uses a National Review Online column to urge action from Muslims who oppose the radical actors perpetrating attacks on the West.

A common complaint you hear these days, especially on the right, is that “moderate” Muslims do nothing to oppose or denounce radical Islam and jihadist terrorism. As a blanket generalization, this is untrue and unfair. If you bother to look, you can easily find examples of this around the world: individual Muslims assisting investigations and lending a hand to victims of terrorism, imams and organizations issuing statements against terrorism, even groups of Muslims bravely standing up for persecuted Christians (such as the Copts in Egypt).

Muslims are often the first targets and victims of the radicals, and even among those who share some of the jihadists’ political beliefs, many would love to see the scourge of Islamist terrorism exterminated. While public polling on extremist attitudes often shows alarmingly large minorities of Muslims holding one or more radical beliefs, they still consistently show majority rejection of most of those beliefs in most countries’ Muslim populations (in both Western countries and majority-Muslim states). …

… [T]he term “moderate Muslims” is itself harmful and counterproductive; it implies that Muslims generally agree with the beliefs of the radicals, but are just more modest in how they want them implemented. For some people and some beliefs, that is undoubtedly true. But the term encourages thinking of Muslims as a single tribe with some wayward members. What’s needed instead is to draw clear lines between those who want the dark political vision of the Islamists, and those who wish to practice their faith in free societies without blasphemy laws, honor killings, the execution of apostates, the honoring of suicide bombers, the pursuit of extermination of Israel, the execution of gays, and the like. Believers in an Islam that can coexist in a pluralistic world need a way to label themselves not only as true Muslims, but also as opponents of these destructive political doctrines.