I met Tanveer Ahmed in Australia last summer. He’s a psychiatrist and occasional stand-up comic. Very funny guy. His column today inclines more toward the sobering:

With hindsight, I can see that what we now call extremism was virtually the norm in the community I grew up in. It was completely normal to view Jews as evil and responsible for the ills of the world. It was normal to see the liberal society around us as morally corrupt, its stains to be avoided at all costs. It was normal to see white girls as cheap and easy and to see the ideal of femininity as its antithesis. These views have been pushed to more private, personal spheres amid the present scrutiny of Muslim communities. But they remain widespread, as research in Britain showed earlier this year: up to 50 per cent of British Muslims aged between 15 and 29 want to see sharia law taken up in Britain.

“What we now call extremism was virtually the norm”: Tanveer gets to the heart of a question President Bush, Prime Minister Brown and others recoil from. How “extremist” can it be to act upon beliefs that are “the norm”?