Drama over Mosques and Islam in Moscow, Too.

The place of Muslims in civilizations that have traditionally been Christian/secular promises to be the single most important issue of the next decade. Just last weekend, the New York Times ran a profile on Pamela Geller, an "outrageous" blogger who has made the intellectual/propaganda war on Islam her own personal crusade. More recently, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, declared that the dream of a multi-cultural Germany is "dead" and that Muslims will need to integrate more fully into their adopted country, learning German and assimilating as fully as possible to the culture around them. Today, I stumbled across this article in Spiegel online: Russian nationalists are challenging the construction of a mosque in a Moscow suburb. The Muslim community in Moscow has a long history, but the past 15 years have seen an ongoing insurgency in Chechnaya as well as terrorist attacks in Moscow itself. Here's the story at the Washington Post.