ISIS took responsibility for an attack in Istanbul where a man dressed as Santa Claus, yelling "God is Great!" in Arabic, slaughtered 39 people and wounded scores more, most of them Muslims.  It seems extremely likely that the attackers were radical Islamists, so this is a clear case of Muslim-on-Muslim violence.

The question is, how did the rest of the Muslim world respond?

Azerbaijani President 聴lham Aliyev urged "a resolute fight against any kind of terrorism[.]"

What kind was that?

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said he and the citizens of his country were saddened by the incident, while the country's foreign minister warned "those who want to undermine the unity of Turkey will never succeed."

Who are those who want to do that?

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) condemned the bomb attacks in Istanbul "in the strongest terms."

What terms?

Saudi Arabia also condemned the "unacceptable" attack. According to a statement published by the state-run SPA news Agency, Saudi Arabia said it stood by fellow countries against terror attacks.

Terror from whom?  More:

Lebanon's Future political movement, known also as Al-Mustaqbal and led by former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, condemned the attack in a statement on Sunday.

"Terror is killing people without discriminating between Muslims and Christians and trying to destroy communities by dividing them," Hariri said.

What?  Is he saying killing people while discriminating between Muslims and Christians is not terrorism?

As for American Muslims, CAIR, the most quoted Muslim organization, says nothing about the attack on its website, though it does have a press release protesting an "Obama & other Muslims not welcome here" sign in a New Mexico convenience store.  Obviously, the people at CAIR have their priorities.

So what do all these "condemnations" have in common?  They fail to make mention of the attackers: radical Muslims.  And something else they have in common: they fail to show very much outrage.

Imagine if an American dressed as Santa killed 39 Muslims while yelling, "Merry Christmas!"  Or imagine if an Israeli dressed as Moses killed 39 Muslims while yelling, "Happy Hanukkah!"  The Muslim world would be outraged.  There would be mass demonstrations.

There were no demonstrations at all here.  Aside from the passive statements from foreign ministries, the Islamic world is silent.

Why?

There are either two possibilities:

1) Either they approve of the killing of fellow Muslims,

or

2) they don't care about the killing of fellow Muslims (unless at the hands of Americans and Israelis).

We are now talking about mainstream Islamic culture, the culture of 1.6 billion people.  There is something fundamentally wrong with the mainstream Muslim religion that, by its silence, is either unconcerned by radical Islam or unconcerned by the murder of even its own coreligionists, effectively showing a lack of value for any human life.  This is a big problem for the mainstream Islamic movement.

You know that if Israel had murdered people, every synagogue would be up in arms.  If radical Christians had murdered people in the name of Christianity, churches everywhere would speak out.

We can no longer hide from the fact that there is a fundamental problem with Islam – not merely the people doing the killing, but the hundreds of millions more who stay silent about it.  What are they thinking?

Ed Straker is the senior writer at NewsMachete.com.