Excerpt:
Last week, the Miller-McCune blog posted a report concerning the trend among secular European governments to provide public funds to build and support mosques within their countries. The operative theory behind this public financing of Islam is to replace the mostly radical clerics who espouse Islamic extremism throughout much of Western Europe with more moderate, government-approved and funded versions.
"A glamorous French-funded mosque, goes the logic, is better than a back-alley prayer room with literature and funding from Riyadh, Damascus or Tehran," the report states.
While there is little to identify the effectiveness of these policies, the underlying basis is clearly rooted in countering the radical theology of Islamism. Genuinely secular and moderate Muslim scholars in the U.S., such as M. Juhdi Jasser, have clearly defined the radical religious nature of Islamists, how that dangerous Muslim theology interfaces with radical political Islamic interests, and have also identified their organizational supporters here in the U.S.