If there is anything that the London blasts have achieved, it is to heighten the apprehensions of American Muslims. Thing have reached to a point where many Muslims can be heard saying that if such an incident were to occur in the United States, then the future Muslims in this country would be a dead-end.

Their apprehensions are not baseless. With the kind of recipes liberal-thinking columnists like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times are providing [to make the United States safe], the Muslims' future in this country is quite bleak.

Many television commentators indirectly suggested that if Muslims do not mend their ways, then they have to be imprisoned in internment camps like [what was done] to the Japanese.

By asking Muslims to mend their ways, the commentators apparently mean that Muslims should shun fundamentalism, adopt moderation, and stop the clash of civilizations with the West. This is the comparatively reasonable aspect of these commentators' demands, and many Muslims would share their opinion on this count.

But coupled with that view is the commentators’ illogical demand that Muslims accept and support U.S. strategy and policy in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Israel, Palestine and other Muslim countries, a policy that the world at large is not ready to support. For that to happen, the U.S. government would need to change its own policy, though chances of that seem slim in the near future.

Friedman gave a simplistic answer to this complex situation by saying that this is only a Muslim problem, and that they need to find its solution. He meant that the Muslims should come up with the kind of solution they displayed in the case of Palestine. In other words, the rest of the Muslim world should imitate the way the Palestinians abandoned their armed national struggle and adopted the course of conciliation with Israel. In Freidman's view, the Muslim world is like a big Palestine in which the United States has to play the role of Israel. It had been the long-standing desire of Israel and their American backers that the U.S. government tailor its policy by considering the Muslim world as a Palestine.

President Bush and the Neo-cons (America's new conservatives) did precisely that. After assuming power, they accepted Israel as their "homeland" and started looking at the Muslim world with an Israeli eye.

Friedman's argument has a basic flaw. Palestinians have never been fundamentalist Muslims. The Palestinian leadership has always been in the hands of secular people. Yasser Arafat was the leader of their biggest organizations, the Palestine Liberation Organization and Al-Fatah. He was a secular by all means. The leader of the second biggest Palestinian group the PFLP [was] George Habbash, a Christian. Therefore, the Palestinians’ conflict with Israel was not lead by fundamentalist Muslims but Palestinian nationalists. There is no denying the fact that fundamentalists have carved a place for themselves in the Palestinian liberation struggle for the past few years now, but that, too, happened only after Israel’s refusal to deal with secular Palestinians over several decades.

Now if Israel-like U.S. policy were to be enacted, it would mean that for the next several decades or perhaps generations, Muslims – moderates and fundamentalists alike – would be suppressed and crushed through the use of force.

If a Muslim fanatic indulged in a dreadful act of terrorism in any part of the world, then every Muslim would be punished the way all the Palestinians were punished. Muslims in the United States would be treated the same way as the Arab population of Israel.

There are indications that Friedman is not just talking about a scenario but is pointing to a policy that is already in place in the United States. If we believe Friedman’s assertion, there are many more Iraqis still to be conquered. So far, Muslims have not accepted defeat verbally, therefore, this policy will go on and its implementation will get even gorier.

With present U.S. policy, there is every possibility that fundamentalists and secular Muslims in the Islamic states will not change their stance of opposing the United States and its European allies. Keep that in mind. Also remember that it’s not just the Muslims but also the majority of the Europe's population that is strongly against U.S. policies.