Comment 9 by Paula Kirby :

Stevehill: I applaud that. We'd have to be crazy to condemn it. I agree. This is the kind of thing we have been asking of Muslims for a long time, and we should welcome it when it happens. I have organised a lot of conferences, and 12,000 attendees is a huge number, a huge achievement.

As people who are trying to be rational and fair and objective, we must avoid getting into the mindset that there's nothing that will ever satisfy us, even when what is done is exactly what we've been asking for.

Does a single conference, however large, solve all issues or reassure us about all our Islam-related concerns? Of course not. I would take issue with Tahir-ul-Qadri's suggestion that 99% of Muslims are peace-loving, for instance, since that now infamous poll of British Muslims after the London bombings showed that an alarming proportion of them felt the bombings were justified.

But is it a very welcome development? Yes, it most certainly is. Let's not be curmudgeonly about it.

I agree also but its kind of depressing that except for your comment and SteveHill's all the other comments have been negative. It just shows that most of the people here don't really care about reason anymore than a fundamentalist Muslim or Christian. They just have their side and they want to piss all over anyone that doesn't agree with them.

And I strongly disagree that this is just some isolated incident. In fact just the opposite, Muslims are doing things like this all the time. The problem is that if one looney Muslim threatens to blow up South Park it gets blasted across the media for days or longer. Declarations like this happen all the time and they are mostly ignored. After 9/11 there was an overwhelming outpouring of condemnation from the Islamic world against terrorism. Even Iran came out in support of the US.