Without having an answer book or peace guru to consult, a good place to begin is looking at the extent of the problem that radical Islam poses for Muslims that do not subscibe to their agenda and do not buy into the radical brand of Islam.

From Salim Mansur's piece in the Toronto Sun we are provided a window into the nature and extent to which Islam's worst enemies, are Muslims.

On the eve of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Islamic calendar, Muslim terrorists belonging to Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiah conducted suicide bombings on the island of Bali.

Then, on the first day of Ramadan, a Sunni Muslim suicide bomber attacked a Shiite mosque in the Iraqi town of Hilla. Among worshippers gathered for prayers, 25 died and nearly 100 were wounded. Ramadan has seen an escalation of suicide bombings in Iraq prior to today's vote on the country's new constitution.

Following the Bali bombing, U.S. President George Bush delivered a major speech in Washington to the membership of the National Endowment for Democracy. He expressed most clearly and specifically -- for the first time on record -- who and what is the enemy the U.S. and its allies are fighting in the war on terror.

"Some call this Islamic radicalism; others, militant jihadism; still others Islamo-fascism," Bush said. "Whatever it's called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: The establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom."

With these remarks, Bush clarified what many of us Muslims know by our experience and the history of our faith tradition -- that is, how greatly Muslims themselves have been terrorized through centuries by the same people who are now waging their indiscriminate war against those who refuse to accept their violently bigoted perversion of Islam.

In Bali the infidels are Hindus; in Iraq the infidels are Shiites and misguided Kurds; for Palestinians, the infidels are Jews. Americans, Europeans, Russians, Chinese, and Hindu Indians are all infidels who are present inside, or inhabit the bordering lands of Muslims, particularly the Middle East. As enemies of radical Islamists, they are to be terrorized indiscriminately, as was the objective of the London bombers this past July, with the aim that they will be compelled to withdraw from lands considered Islamic.

The internal war within the Muslim world, which is as old as Islam itself, went savagely global in the final decades of the last century. On 9/11 this internal conflict among Muslims erupted inside the United States, awakening America to the international menace of radical Islam in much the same way as Japanese militarism did 60 years earlier at Pearl Harbor.

Since Samuel Huntington's widely read Foreign Affairs's essay, published in the summer 1993 issue of the journal, the idea of "the clash of civilizations" has come to be the most handy explanation of the troubled relationship between the Muslim world and the West.

Huntington's phrase, "Islam has bloody borders," was provocative and yet not inaccurate. Islamic or, more appropriately, Muslim militancy has fuelled a mindless and bigoted conflict, civilizational in nature, that sort of peaked with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

But what Huntington's essay, and later his book on the same theme, and other writings of similar kind does not mention, and the subject remains largely unexplored, is the bloodier conflict within the
Muslim world. The phenomenon of Muslim violence against Muslims demands attention, for it is primarily this inner conflict which periodically spills over beyond the borders of the Muslim world.

More Muslims have been killed by Muslims, more Muslims continue to be victimized by Muslims, and more Muslims are in danger of dying at the hands of Muslims than non-Muslims. This is a subject that demands a wider examination and attention than has been given by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Of Muslim violence against Muslims, we are concerned here primarily with the politically organized violence of those in power against those who are contesting that power, and the appeal to Islam is made in common by all parties in the conflict. In writing about this subject, we do not need to look at the record of Muslim violence against Muslims from archives, for the subject continues to be part of the experience of contemporary Muslims and in many instances is part of their living memory.

In my case, I was both a victim and a witness to organized violence of a Muslim majority state against its own population with the result that one out of seven people, nearly ten million, were forced from their homes to take refuge in a neighbouring country as refugees and over half-million were killed.

I am referring to the actions of the military government of Pakistan against the people of former East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971. This was a politically catastrophic event of genocidal proportions in the modern history of the Muslim world. A brief description of the culture and politics surrounding the founding of Pakistan in 1947, and the manner in which it broke apart 24 years later, can well illustrate that aspect of Muslim history, Muslim violence against Muslims, that has received insufficient notice in the writings about Muslims and Islam.

And it is against that end, and in the interim struggle against it, that both "moderate" (up to now - perceived by non-Muslims to be mostly as a group of "no shows.") Muslims and non-Muslims are in a life and death struggle to prevent. But not all of us recognize either the problem or the extent of it, there is little trust among us, and there appears to be far more questions about how to address the problem, then solutions.

To further complicate the matter, the voices of "moderate" Muslims has so far been subjugated by Islamic leaders, and Islamic groups such as CAIR (and others like them), who represent themselves and have been accepted by the political powers that be, as moderates, but who are indeed, anything but moderates - further straining the credibility of the very existance of "moderate" Muslims.

This brings us to the big questions: Assuming all that we've looked at here is reasonably accurate and representative of the situation that "we" find ourselves in, we Muslims and non-Muslims, where do we go from here, and how best can we get there?

This ends "On Islam's worst enemies and how to defeat them - Part I" of a work in process, that began with one of my conversations that I've had with Muslim friends at the local Starbucks. The beginings of a dialogue between us has been initiated, and Part II of this piece has begun. We are going to see what can be done in our particular community to answer the above "big questions," and that dialogue, along with input from readers (via comments and email), is to be Part II - already in process. We are not out to change the world here - just to look for some answers, seeds if you will, for use in the larger community of mankind.

Starting with a single Starbucks community, add in a blog community, throw in a little larger blog community and perhaps another Starbucks community ... well, you get the idea.

Hell, we're all angry about what's going on, but getting mad is the easy part, it's working together to find answers that although may be difficult to accomplish, it just happens to be the only way to stop the madness that we all now find ourselves in. We can't simply stop the world and get off, we need to stop the insanity!