As thousands of Egyptians hit the streets in response to a call from Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi asking for a mandate to crush demonstrating supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, one has to ask the simple question: Is the Middle East turning away from radicalism and becoming more moderate?

The signs of moderation in political leadership can no longer be ignored. Look at Iran, where after eight years of a radical president, Iranians elected the relatively moderate Hassan Rouhani. Look at Qatar, where the emir and prime minister had been intervening in regional conflicts on behalf of hard-liners, but now publicly supports the military-installed interim president of Egypt after its new, young emir, Sheikh Tamim, took over and fired the prime minister.

Al Jazeera, Qatar’s once-dominant pan-Arab TV satellite channel, has been losing audiences who can no longer tolerate its brand of biased and sometimes-inciting rhetoric. The most popular comedian in the region, Bassem Youssef, has become one of the most influential Arabs after cloning the American Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Last month, Youssef hosted Jon Stewart, who spoke openly about his Jewishness in front of a Cairo studio audience and millions of TV viewers. Even relatively moderate rule by Islamists in Turkey is being challenged as the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is pressured to be more accommodating to the country’s secular activists.

Washington has noticed the change. In late May, President Barack Obama made a long and detailed speech that represented a considerable step back from his predecessor’s so-called war on terror. In the Palestinian context, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, purged some of its radical leaders, among them Mahmoud Zahar and Izzat Risheq, before re-electing Khaled Meshaal as the head of a relatively more moderate political bureau. Hamas has toned down its rhetoric after having lost within a short period of time its financial support from Iran, its headquarters in Syria, and its neighboring ally in deposed Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi.