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Jiro comments on A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies - Less Wrong
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This part of the metaphor doesn't work.
Religious people generally condemn heretics even more strongly than nonbelievers. Liberal Christians, specifically, are generally more opposed to fundamentalist Christians' policies than liberal atheists' policies - for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they're wildly misinterpreting key passages and it's really really obvious, and the fact that there's a readily-available blue/green divide between them.
Wouldn't the attitude of moderate Muslims to more extreme Muslims often be an example of where the metaphor does work?
I don't know nearly as many Muslims as I do Christians, but I generally get the impression that liberal Muslims don't have unusually strong reactions to atheism and other religions? Whereas they are, if anything, more threatened by Muslim terrorists - because of the general name-blackening, in addition to the normal fear response to your tribe being attacked.
Has this not been your experience?
I get the sense that battles over liberal vs. traditional vs. fundamentalist Islam, and over secularism in historically Islamic regions, are at least as hard-fought as their Christian equivalents are in the US -- but also that they get fought mostly on majority-Muslim turf. Here in the West, Islam takes on ethnic and cultural dimensions that work against that dynamic.
I was thinking more of cases such as high percentages of moderate Muslims in some countries support executing apostates.
Where are you getting "moderate" from? That link only gives the support for the death penalty for apostacy among Muslims who want sharia to be enforced as national law -- which isn't incompatible with a moderate approach to the religion, for some values of "moderate", but certainly doesn't imply one. The percentages given also correspond pretty well to my expectations for religious fundamentalism in those countries.
If you combine those percentages with the percentages who want Sharia as national law in the first place, you end up concluding that the majority of some countries, and very large minorities of others, want apostates to die.
Of course, whether a group is "moderate" is a matter of semantics. These people are not moderate by comparison to Western standards, but they are moderate in the context of their own countries--that is, their positions are middle of the road compared to the general population (and they may actually be the general population).
(Is a Nazi whose beliefs are typical for Nazis considered a moderate Nazi or an extremist Nazi?)
So, in other words, you're talking moderate relative to the country. That might make sense if we were discussing internal politics in Jordan, say, but it doesn't seem like an especially natural interpretation of "moderate Muslim" in a global context: to me, that phrase brings to mind nations like Indonesia.