There is a very well-thought out essay that is being extensively shared by email recently titled The Peaceful Majority. Its message is so very important that we are going to reproduce the entire text here, but first we want to explain our attribution.

This heartfelt piece was written February 20, 2006 by Paul Marek, the proud father of a son deployed with the Canadian Forces. It first appeared on his weblog, Celestial Junk. On March 1, 2006 it was reproduced with correct attribution in Front Page Magazine.

At the end of January this year, the article was posted to start a discussion thread at Free Republic. But it was incorrectly attributed to William Haynes, a legal counsel to the US Department of Defense who is currently being attacked in the German courts for “war crimes.” This incorrect attribution was also picked up by several other major league websites, including Think-Israel, WordPress Tags, and Answers.com, among many others.

With such web-based powerhouses propagating the mistake, now most of the weblogs that are sharing this material have made the incorrect attribution as well. Someone has even added an email address, ostensibly for Haynes, at the bottom of the emailed version, and the erroneous authorship has gone “viral.” We believe that bloggers have an opportunity to counter the mistakes and biases of the mainstream media, but only if we have a passion for accuracy ourselves. So we have taken a few paragraphs here in the interests of good weblog journalism. Without further ado, here is the original article.

I used to know a man whose family were German aristocracy prior to World War Two. They owned a number of large industries and estates. I asked him how many German people were true Nazis, and the answer he gave has stuck with me and guided my attitude toward fanaticism ever since.

“Very few people were true Nazis” he said, “but, many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.”

We are told again and again by “experts” and “talking heads” that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unquantified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is, that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is, that the “peaceful majority” is the “silent majority” and it is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people. The Average Japanese individual prior to World War 2 was not a war mongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of Killing that included the systematic killing of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet. And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were “peace loving”.

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by the fanatics. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awake one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others, have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.