As many people will by now properly and completely understand, I believe that there should be no dislike of or harm done to people just because they are Muslims. That doesn’t mean that we should not criticise or even hold Islam in contempt as an ideology or mock those who try to defend that which is indefensible in the ideology of Islam or point out the dangers of Islamic extremism.

We should be fully aware that not every Muslim is a terrorist or a child exploiter or a backward looking violent individual. It is my belief that the Muslim community does produce decent and respectable individuals. I should know as I’ve met hundreds of such people, some of whom are so decent that they make me want to dance around my kitchen singing ‘Od Yavo Shalom Aleynu’. Of course this doesn’t mean that orthodox Islam has made them decent people, in my view decent Muslims are decent people in spite of the teachings of Islam rather than because of them. Some people are just inherently decent and would be that way no matter what religion or culture they were brought up in.

There are also those who do what Christians and Jews have done in recent centuries and reinterpreted Islamic scripture to take account of greater knowledge whether that be in the scientific, philosophical or cultural fields. We also need to know that there are many of those who belong to Islamic paths that have long since abandoned the violence, hatred and supremacism that characterises too much of Sunni and Shia Islam. We should not and must not look at the peaceful, non-misogynistic and respectable Ismailis and Ahmediyya and see them as the same as the screaming Sunni and Shia nutjobs that are implicated in so much of the Islam related horror that afflicts the world today.

People should give praise and credit when praise and credit is due. A person doing the right thing is a person doing the right thing no matter who they are.

A good example of someone who happens to be Muslim doing the right thing can be found in the story below of how decent Muslims rescued two Jewish men who had been attacked outside of a Kosher restaurant by ‘Asian’ men who we must presume, because of the fact that it is Jewish men who were targeted, were not Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists or Methodists. It is most likely that the men who attacked these Jewish men were Muslim, yet it was a Muslim individual who did the right thing and stepped up to protect the Jews who were being attacked.

The London Evening Standard said:

A Muslim man stepped in to defend two Jewish diners who were punched in a racially aggravated attack outside a Baker Street restaurant, police have revealed.

The two victims were followed by two masked men in their late teens or early 20s who then rushed them and unleashed a flurry of punches.

Detectives are treating the incident as a hate crime after the thugs made anti-semitic comments as they launched their attack at 5.20pm on Sunday.

A member of the Muslim community confronted the attackers who ran off after the intervention.

One of the victims is in his late 30s and the other mid 40s, police said. Their attackers were described by officers as Asian.

This is the sort of thing that we need to see more of. We need to see decent Muslims taking down and going after the nutcases that have been spawned by their own community. I doubt very much that those men who attacked the Jewish men were anything other than Muslims acting out the Jew hatred that the ideology of Islam so often prescribes. Well done. After reading about this decent individual and what he has done it looks like I’m going to be dancing around my kitchen singing Od Yavo Shalom Aleynu’ again.