Source: The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/08/opinion/08friedman.html?pagewanted=all

On July 8, 2005 The New York Times ran an opinion piece by columnist Thomas L. Friedman, about the London bombings on July 7. Friedman writes, "When jihadist-style bombings happen in Riyadh, that is a Muslim-Muslim problem... for Saudi Arabia. But when Al-Qaeda-like bombings come to the London Underground, that becomes a civilizational problem. Every Muslim living in a Western society suddenly becomes a suspect, becomes a potential walking bomb... So this is a critical moment. We must do all we can to limit the civilizational fallout from this bombing. But this is not going to be easy... Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent. And because I think that would be a disaster, it is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult."