Does the West have a perception problem when it comes to Islam?

Raymond Ibrahim, editor of The Al-Qaeda Reader, asks some valid questions in response to Tariq Ramadan's recent one-way talk via satellite at Georgetown University.

Tariq Ramadan is a grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and currently a research fellow at Oxford University. He was unable to address Georgetown in person because the U.S. government refuses to grant him a visa.

While Ibrahim's entire article is worth reading, I extract here for you his response to Ramadan's charge that the West is obsessed with radical Islam to the point of refusing to even see that the vast majority of the world's Muslims are actually moderate and peaceful.

As Ibrahim writes:

[E]ven if we were to agree with Ramadan that the vast majority of Muslims are “moderates” and that, say, only a mere 20 percent of Muslims are “literalists,” that simply means that some 200 million Muslims in the world today are dedicated enemies of the infidel West. At any rate, when it comes to instilling terror, numbers are of no significance. It took only 19 to wreak great havoc and destruction on American soil on 9/11. It won’t take much more to duplicate that horrific day. This is precisely why, to use Ramadan’s own words, “we are obsessed by the few [radical Muslims] and not seeing the many [moderate Muslims].” That most Muslims are good, law-abiding citizens and that only a mere minority of the umma, say, 200 million, are hell-bent on destroying the West — how is that supposed to be any comfort to us?

This is a question that Muslims will have to answer. The bottom line is that there is in fact a dangerous element that operates under the banner of Islam.

If the West seems obsessed, well, the West is not accustomed to burying its head in the sand, so to speak. The Western way is to identify problems and then try to solve them. Critical thinking is revered - as are satire and mockery - as that's what it takes to root out tyranny, oppression - and yes, terrorism.