Via Glenn Reynolds, here's Jeff Jarvis with some excellent questions about tiptoeing tolerantly around murder:

Tolerance is good and necessary and civilized. Multiculturism is good; I'm so multi-culti I don't know how mult-culti I am. But tolerance for criminals is always dangerous and wrong-headed. See the post below on the angry young men. We would not tolerate and understand and whisper about KKK killers or Nazis or serial killers. Why should we tiptoe tolerantly around the murderers of 7/7 or 9/11 or any day in Iraq today just because they are multi to our culti? We should not.

The reaction of Dutch people I spoke to was that things are way out of hand. While there's no rejection of tolerance, there's now a growing, common sense recognition that tolerance ought to be a two way street, and that it is time to end toleration of intolerance.

With the Dutch in mind, take a look at the reporting in today's Philadelphia Inquirer on the London murders:

LUTON, England - The bearded imam at the central mosque here didn't mince words as he condemned last week's suicide bombings in London.

"This was an attack against all humanity," Masood Akhtar Hazarui said. "The people who were killed, most of them were probably against the war in Iraq. So that is not a rationalization."

But down the street, a young taxi driver in wraparound sunglasses had a different take.

"What they did was wrong, full stop," said Kamran Khan, 26. "But you have to ask why they done it. The main reason was to make a point. To be heard, in a sense. I don't agree with what they done, but I understand what drove them to do it."

Does it matter whether we "agreed" with what Charles Manson or John Wayne Gacy (or, for that matter, Tomas de Torquemada) did? Should we understand what "drove them to do it?"

Author Ken Dilanian goes on to quote a young man who wants to be a police officer:

"What happens now depends on how the British government responds," said Luton resident Sadaqat Hussein, 18. "They need to stop blaming all Muslims for it. And they need to wake up and realize we are in a democracy, and we need to stop this illegal war in Iraq."

Therein lies another quandary: In interviews over the last week, young Muslim men repeatedly have made it clear that while they disagree with the methods of the suicide bombers, they are sympathetic to the presumed cause - a passionate opposition to Britain's role in what they see as deeply immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many British Muslims view as equally reprehensible, for example, the attacks on the World Trade Center and this year's U.S. invasion of Fallujah, which killed about 1,500 Iraqis.

"George Galloway said it best - Tony Blair's got blood on his hands," said Razaran Khan, 18, referring to a left-wing member of Parliament who suggested that Britain's role in the Iraq war had provoked the London terror attack. "He put Britain in the firing line."

Hussein, who says he wants to be a police officer, and Khan, who intends to study medicine, do not come off as extremists. Polite and well-informed, they live and go to school here in a community of Muslims who hail largely from the Kashmir region of Pakistan.

They said they were shocked that British-born Muslims, some their age, would mount a suicide attack.

"They obviously were brainwashed," Hussein said.

They also said they enjoy living in Britain and consider themselves British. But, they said, they cannot understand or accept that the British government embarked on what they consider an illegal war in Iraq after millions marched on the streets of Europe to protest it.

They feel so strongly, in fact, that they said they would find it acceptable for a British Muslim to go to Iraq and fight against the British soldiers stationed there.

For these young men, the brotherhood of Islam trumps national identity.

Looking at this as carefully as I can, I can only conclude that finding the killing of one's fellow countrymen "acceptable" does not strike the Inquirer as an extremist position.

At least, not for someone who wants to be a police officer.

I don't know whether this is what Jeff Jarvis would call tolerant tiptoeing, but it strikes me as more along the level of kowtowing to intolerance (the logical opposite of tolerance).

Certainly, another stereotype has been smashed.

Unless the Inquirer's view is a bizarre Philadelphia aberration, I'd say the Dutch have moved ahead of us. By saying no to the forces of intolerance, they've now got a better handle on tolerance than champions of intolerance like Ken Dilanian.

Should I have stayed there maybe?