Muslim extremists target ordinary Muslims, too, and often first. Who was subjugated under the Taliban (the closest thing to the Nazis in the Muslim world) in Afghanistan? Muslims. Who is being murdered by extremist groups in Iraq? Muslims.

Are Muslims speaking up? Of course they are. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have signed the Not in the Name of Islam petition, which states: “We, the undersigned Muslims, wish to state clearly that those who commit acts of terror, murder and cruelty in the name of Islam are not only destroying innocent lives, but are also betraying the values of the faith they claim to represent. No injustice done to Muslims can ever justify the massacre of innocent people, and no act of terror will ever serve the cause of Islam.”

The most important Muslim scholars in American and across the world have not only denounced terrorism and fundamentalism, but written scholarly papers articulating how highly the Muslim tradition values peace and pluralism. Check out Khaled Abou El Fadl’s The Place of Tolerance in Islam and Umar Abd-Allah’s Mercy, The Stamp of Creation.

In their important new book Who Speaks for Islam?, my friends Dalia Mogahed and John Esposito call this the "silenced majority". Based on the largest and most comprehensive study of Muslims ever undertaken, their findings include that Muslims and Americans are equally likely to reject attacks on civilians as morally unjustifiable.

In other words, we Muslims want people to know that we hate Muslim fanatics as much as non-Muslims do, and we are shocked and hurt that so many people either aren’t listening or don’t believe us.

I sometimes tell audiences of non-Muslims that if there was a Muslim extremist in the room with one bullet in his gun, and you and I were up against the wall, chances are that he would shoot me first. I am doubly hateful to him. Not only do I not follow his radical way of life, I put a different idea of what it means to be Muslim out in the world.

The Nazis combined total evil with total power – military, media, education, even the family. They rammed their program through every imaginable institution in Germany.

Muslim extremists don’t have even a fraction of this power. What they have is two things. The first is terrorism. And as I wrote in a piece for Slate last year, “Terrorism, we are learning, is more than heinous murder and guerrilla theater. It is a kind of macabre magic intended to create the illusion of enemies everywhere.”

The second thing that Muslim extremists rely on is your fear.

The fear that buys ridiculous analogies about Muslims and Nazis as reasoned arguments. The fear that accepts the illusion of your Muslim neighbor as the enemy. The fear that silences the majority of Muslims trying to tell you that they want peace, prosperity and pluralism, too.