Surprisingly, I am not talking about Christian fundamentalists or the toady Republican politicians who kowtow to them. Today I am speaking about Muslim fundamentalists.

I respect other people and beliefs, but my understanding ends at the point which opposing belief turns into physical violence. Believe anyting you want, but if your belief system says it is okay to commit physcal violence, then suddenly I no longer respect your beliefs nor do I support your right to practice such beliefs if they involved violence against others.

And so when I read that a Muslim cleric put out an assassination contract on cartoonists, I was stunned and disgusted. Sure enough, Peshawar cleric Maulana Yousef Qureshi personally offered to pay a bounty of 500,000 rupees to anyone who killed a Danish cartoonist, and two of his congregation put up additional rewards of $1 million and one million rupees plus a car.

He went on to justify his very un-religious decree by saying, "If the West can place a bounty on Osama bin Laden and Zawahri we can also announce reward for killing the man who has caused this sacrilege of the holy Prophet."

Of course, there is a difference between putting out a bounty for the capture of a known criminal responsible for planning and executing a terrorist action that killed thousands of people and putting out a contract for the murder of cartoonists. That is not even a fine distinction. It is a purposeful misstatement intended to confuse and mislead. Which, apparently, it has done admirably.

So my opinion is this. The flavor of fanatic Islam that Maulana Yousef Qureshi believes in is a perversion of true Islam. People who follow his warped version of Islam are ignorant at best and criminal at worst, and need to be dealt with in the same manner that criminal organizations such as the Mafia are dealt with. True Muslims have a duty to Islam to condemn this perversion. Failure to do so makes them complicit in the criminal act and denigrates Islam in the eyes of others worldwide. If Muslims do not respect Islam enough to protect it from being misused by insiders and misunderstood by outsiders, then it isn't a very effective faith.