When Muslim radicals go nuts, it's a sign of barbarism. When they don't, it's hypocrisy. Except, of course, the fact that China doesn't claim to be a progressive democracy. Even Muslims can smell the rank hypocrisy of European countries that claim to be secular and yet define religion for their marginalized populations; China claims no such authority, no such progressive humanism, and as such, their violence -- while deeply upsetting -- is not "surprising". That doesn't make it okay, but it does mean people have less to be shocked by, unfortunately. Plus Denmark is tiny and Europe is militarily weak: Let's be honest. Easy target. That doesn't make it okay, but if we are political observers, we can understand political actors.
The deeper issue here is that -- and this is so important -- religion is judged by its adherence to an immaterial standard; the distinction is deeply problematic in Islam, among other religions, and any way, it implies a feeling that if a religious person is not one hundred percent perfect, s/he is a hypocrite. Islam must go all the way! Muslims must be fully Muslim, or their Islam is wack. Is Naim encouraging Muslims to demonstrate like crazy, burn buildings and turn to violence? Professor Sherman Jackson, while at NYU, noted that if such people were Muslim, they would very likely be fundamentalists in the worst sense, because they do not understand nuance, nor the give-and-take that Islam recognizes is part of reality. You cannot have a "perfect" world -- when you try, it just makes it worse. Traditionally, the Islamic legacy recognized this. Why is it so hard for commentators to get this?
But... on top of this... I would counter that there is a reaction to this violence in the Muslim world, and it will get stronger. It is not so much hypocrisy as, in part, strategic necessity (one cannot fight every battle one wants to -- if you did, you would be Gregory House, but the Muslim world is not pure genius and cannot risk the consequences) and the other part, media reality: What gets covered and what doesn't. Keep in mind that until 1996, for example, and al-Jazeera, most Arabs got their news either through a "foreign" medium or through state-sponsored channels, in which case it was not actually news so much as Vicodin for the mind. As China rises and simultaneously more media proliferates, you will see more Muslims agitated by cases such as East Turkestan.
In the meantime, China will invade Turkey, and they will in the process push all the Muslims between Kashgar and Edirne into Europe, making Eurabia a reality and then commentators can be happy at an absence of hypocrisy and excess of Muslims. (That is some 420 million extra people; Arabs, no need to get up, China will go right by your northern flank.) Then I will write a better blog post than this one.
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