In opinion pieces published today, both Steve Emerson in The Daily Beast and William Kristol in The New York Times make a similar point: that the liberal commentariat are apparently unable and/or unwilling to say what they see.

Emerson approvingly quotes Aijaz Zaka Syed of the Khaleej Times arguing that Islamist terrorism is a Muslim problem that needs to be resolved by Muslims. Emerson continues:

It is time to start listening to folks like Mr Syed or the courageous Zuhdi Jasser, rather than cave in to the PC crowd…After more than 7 years since 9/11, we can now issue a verdict: Islamic terrorists have won our hearts and minds. Let’s thank those who made it happen: the U.S. government, European governments and the mainstream media. It’s time to stop placating or being intimidated by Islamic front groups who masquerade as civil rights groups. In 2007, the perversity of was demonstrated when the FBI released its annual 2007 hate crime reports. Of the total 1,628 victims of anti-religious hate crimes, 69.2% were Jewish and 8.7% were Muslim. Yet by my still unfinished account, there were at least 40 times more stories last year about Islamophobia than about anti-Semitism.

Similarly, Kristol takes Martha Nussbaum to task for being overly concerned about the impact of the attacks on Muslims in her LA Times op-ed. Says Kristol:

Nussbaum’s main concern is not explaining or curbing Islamic terror. Rather, she writes that “if, as now seems likely, last week’s terrible events in Mumbai were the work of Islamic terrorists, that’s more bad news for India’s minority Muslim population.” She deplores past acts of Hindu terror against India’s Muslims. She worries about Muslim youths being rounded up on suspicion of terrorism with little or no evidence. And she notes that this is “an analogue to the current ugly phenomenon of racial profiling in the United States.”

So jihadists kill innocents in Mumbai — and Nussbaum ends up decrying racial profiling here. Is it just that liberal academics are required to include some alleged ugly American phenomenon in everything they write?

These are sound points, though it’s important to remember - as one often has to do with conservative writers - that racism against Muslims in western countries is not a phantom. It is a real phenomenon that we need to monitor and condemn and fight. And in doing so, we should also remember that the victims can be victimized on more than one level. I recall growing up in an England where south Asians were rarely placed, as they are now, in a category labeled “Muslims,” and where violence against them - under the rubric of the foul term “P-ki bashing” - was all too frequent. As any consistent anti-racist will tell you, one does not need Islamist terrorism to generate racism, just as one does not need Israeli policy to generate antisemitism.

Still, Emerson and Kristol speak to a wider point so ably identified yesterday by my co-writer Eamonn McDonagh: the tendency among some western liberals and leftists to regard Islamist terrorists as somehow less than responsible for their actions, triggered as these are by oppressions which are somehow graver than other oppressions elsewhere in the world. Muslims are first and foremost the victims of outside forces.

This way of thinking both obscures the fact that Islamists cause much of the suffering which Muslims experience, not just through terror, but the numerous restrictions imposed on what we in the west call “privacy,” and commits the error of perceiving Muslims as a unified bloc with common interests. As Eamonn says, there is a refusal to question to what extent “this belief may be true or how it squares, for example, with the United States under George W. Bush having been the chief midwife at the birth of Kosovo or to what extent it might or might not be shared by those Muslims of North East Iraq who are normally referred to as Kurds.”

Some people - especially those at the margins, like Caroline Lucas - will never learn. But many more can - and should - be engaged to think about what Paul Berman called, on the final page of Terror and Liberalism, the “anti-nihilist system.” Recognizing, as Berman says, that “freedom for others means safety for ourselves. Let us be for the freedom of others.”