by Ian Wendt

Today, the Muslim world is struggling with numerous challenges: absolute monarchs, dictators, internal inequalities, confrontation with modernity and social change, the poison of oil wealth, economic stagnation, human rights abuses to name a few. But the paramount ordeal for contemporary Muslim societies is the disease of radicalism.

Radical militants terrorize, radicalize and destroy their own communities first. Only then do they attack their neighbors and the world. Even as they spread carnage and terror abroad, Muslim radicals make graveyards of their own communities. For their own sake, Muslim societies must reject radical militancy. For our sake, we need to help them.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), then the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Hamas, and other militant groups became famous by attacking Israel, western airplanes, and western innocents. But they have done their greatest damage to the Palestinian people. The current fighting between Fatah (the PLO’s political party) and Hamas is the most recent obvious expression of decades of corruption, abuse, militant attacks and internal terror perpetrated by radicals against the Palestinian people.

In Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion, a decade long fight by various Mujahideen, followed by a decade of civil war rendered this once diverse, moderate, even cosmopolitan, land a wasteland of radicalism under the rule of the Taliban. The Taliban became international radical Muslim stars, supporting Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and exporting radicalism to the world, all while destroying their own society. Their continuing war on the people of Afghanistan has wrought generational devastation.

Lebanese radicalism is embodied in Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. The Lebanese civil war destroyed a once beautiful society. Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad have also maintained a long term, low-level war with Israel. Moreover, they continue to strive to radicalize, divide and do violence to their own society. This week an anti-Syrian Muslim legislator and nine others were killed in a car bombing, threatening the stability of the Lebanese unity government.

read more at YAHOO!