WHERE ARE THE MODERATE MUSLIMS? “They are out there, I suspect; in larger numbers than we might be led to believe. But if most are silent and fearful of speaking out, can you blame them?”

We need to make the moderates feel safer — and the extremists much more nervous. That’s why things like the pandering response to the Cartoon Wars, by everyone from Borders to the Bush Administration, are exactly wrong. Plus, there’s this:

The pandering has escalated: Last month, Columbia University held a conference that included as a “highlight” a video of Libyan dictator Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi presenting “his views on the prospects for democracy in the twenty-first century.” Columbia’s teachers and administrators are apparently untroubled by the fact that Libya’s leading dissident, Fathi Eljami, is currently rotting in one of Qaddafi’s dungeons.

And in Tunisia, democracy advocate Neila Charchour Hachicha is under police surveillance — her phone and internet connections severed, her car confiscated, her daughter threatened and her husband in prison. What did she do to deserve such punishment? It’s not clear, but she did give an interview to Middle East Quarterly (www.meforum.org/article/732) about impediments to reform in Tunisia and she spoke at the “neo-con” American Enterprise Institute about the need for democracy in the Middle East.

The routine imprisonment and torture of dissidents in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia almost never prompts UN officials to consider interfering — or even criticizing. Once in a while, a Western diplomat expresses concern.

“I keep hearing, ‘Why are liberals silent?’” Said al-Ashmawy, an Egyptian judge and author, recently said. “How can we write? Who is going to protect me?”

If we in the West ever want to have allies in Arab and Muslim countries, we’ll need to start supporting moderates — and stop empowering their oppressors. Most immediately, it would be useful if American ambassadors in Muslim countries would welcome dissidents to their offices as they do cabinet ministers. And perhaps Columbia University President Lee Bollinger – whose “primary teaching and scholarly interests are focused on free speech and First Amendment issues” — might recognize how his institution has been compromised and at least express concern.

You’d think.

UPDATE: James Somers emails:

It is indeed passing strange that so many people who might be expected to sympathize with moderate Muslims – the Bush Administration, bookstores, the media, and other governments, to name a few examples – should undertake so consistently to undercut the many moderate Muslims out there, while appeasing a handful of terrorists. Perhaps the reason they’ve done this is because they don’t really believe their own oft-proclaimed cliche: that Islam is a peaceful religion, and that the periodic acts of terrorism done in its name over the past few decades are the acts of a handful of extremists. If those in our society with the easiest access to influential megaphones don’t believe their own cliche, that’s sad. I happen to think the cliche is true. But tolerance needs good soil to, well, grow more tolerance, and so it’s very unfortunate that intolerance is what’s usually being brooked these days.

Indeed.