Are we owed an apology?

The trouble Dr. Graham is pointing to is the awesomely wide acceptance of the Sept. 11 actors as martyrs. Their names are hallowed because they professed themselves engaged in acts of faith. If theirs is held to be the true faith by 19-year-old zealots, then to whom do we turn to discredit the religious credentials the killers invoked?

If a band of Americans, proclaiming their devotion to the faith, assaulted a Muslim center, we would not need to wait very long for disavowals by Christian leaders. When John Brown carried his faith to unreasonable lengths, we hanged him. What we are waiting for, says Dr. Graham, is an apology from Muslim leaders. Why shouldn't we have that -- an explicit disavowal, as contrary to acceptable teachings of the Koran, of the acts of the terrorists?

What we have is denunciations of Dr. Graham for admitting the hypothetical possibility that the Sept. 11 actors were credible Muslims. Dr. Faiz Rehman, who is communications director for the American Muslim Council, says that Dr. Graham "is sounding like a broken record." But the silence of the sovereign Muslim community is sounding like unbroken muteness. If the position of the American Muslim Council is that it is humiliating even to speculate that the killers had a root in Islam, they should tell us what it is they plan to do about those in the Muslim world who applaud the terrorists' acts and their mission.

You and I -- because we are so intelligent(!) and so balanced morally(!), know that what happened on Sept. 11 can only be dismissed as a perversion. A perversion of something. But our concern is that our blissful sophistication in such matters isn't shared as widely as it ought to be. When we conquered Hitler, we denied the Germans the right to buy a copy of "Mein Kampf." Should we ask the Muslim leaders to circulate only the University of North Carolina edition of the Qur'an?