I was pretty much in agreement with your take on this issue until I came to this passage:

I should probably have marked that paragraph with a [snark][/snark] tag. I admit that I was venting a bit there.

I'm not sure what to make of it because I don't think anyone on this thread is advocating "hurt feelings should trumph civil liberties".

It is entirely possible that you're right. In fact, given that you know all involved better than I do (if for no other reason then by virtue of your having been a regular on ET longer than I), you very probably are right. It's just that clichés like 'treating [religion] with the respect it deserves' raise a lot of little red flags in my mind - particularly after this very line was used over and over and over again during the Cartoon Jihad in early '06 - by precisely the people who were arguing that we should stop spitting religious madmen in the eye to avoid upsetting their tender sensibilities.

During the mid- late 90s there was a tone of Political Correctness that some wingers argued tended to do this kind of thing, limiting valid discourse so as not to offend a particular group, but I don't see that much anymore--at least not in the US.

Our perspectives differ somewhat on this, I think. I agree with you that political correctness is not the overburdening problem of Western society (and frankly, good riddance). I also agree with you that some of the backlash against the norm of political correctness has been extreme (think Ann Coulter, Jörg Heider and our own Pia Kjærsgaard).

The problem is, however, that in the area of religion, we have not quite gotten rid of 'political correctness.' People's unsupported assertions are accorded an almost postmodernist credibility so long as they profess sufficient piety. Think, again, Ann Coulter. Or "Dr." Kent Hovind. Or, for that matter Bush 28.

(The scare quotes around political correctness in the preceding paragraph is due to the fact that religious apologetics has been around much longer than political correctness - I really don't think the two have much to do with one another, but I lack a better term for the undue reverence bestowed upon apologists.)

Another problem is that the nature of (modern) politics is that debates get polarized into two camps, split neatly along party lines. I largely blame the media for this. It would be highly unfortunate if the left were to start supporting anti-secular Muslims simply because the right opposes them and wants to bomb them.

Unfortunately, that is precisely what happened in many cases during both the Rushdie crisis and the Cartoon Jihad. Part of this may be due to the fact that saying 'I think the ayatollahs are crazy, but bombing Tehran is probably counterproductive' is too long for a soundbite by about a factor of three, it was often shortened to simply 'don't bomb Tehran' - while an admirable sentiment in and of itself, in the context of the debate it looked too much like bending over backwards to please a bunch of madmen. That being said, however, there really were fairly prominent people who argued that it would have been better if Rushdie had just kept quiet. And that's problematic, to put it very mildly.

I will concede that I very likely overreacted. I tend to get a bit (over)sensitive to people on 'my side' of the political spectrum repeating lines that I associate strongly with anti-secular apologetics.

A final disclaimer: I am not comparing the artistic quality of the Satanic Verses to a bunch of editorial cartoons - that would probably be demeaning to Rushdie's work. I simply use this as an example to broaden the scope of my argument a bit.

[snipped for size]

This is hardly being 'bashful' for fear of hurting a particular group's (1.61 Billion Muslims) feelings.

True. Then again, I would argue that one of the roles of the media is to shine the light of day on such vermin. The problem, as I see it, is not so much that they report on the Muslim madmen more than on the Muslim moderates - that's hardly surprising, since moderation is considered default behaviour. The problem is that they don't turn the same critical light on the neo-nazis, the Opus Dei or the bigots who assault and frequently attempt to murder GLBT people.

The impression that Islam is uniquely violent and bloodthirsty stems, I think, not so much from the reporting on Muslim extremists as from the embarrassing failure to report on almost all other kinds of extremists.

Here's another instance. The Catholic church is a huge and ideologically complex institution. That is, there are threads throughout the Catholic tradition that are not very conservative at all (contra Ratzinger)

That's certainly correct. One might privately wonder why they remain Catholic when they disagree with the doctrine that seems to an outsider to be the single most important feature of the Catholic Church, namely Papal authority. But hey, that's none of my business, and if it floats their boat...

...they argue for work with the poor, (Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers),

I have more than a few reservations regarding organisations that combine charity and missionary work. But let's leave that discussion to another day.

political liberalism and various softer forms of socialism (Liberation Theology) and strongly disapprove of militarism (Ploughshares movement, represented by Phil and Dan Berrigan), ecumenicalism (Thomas Merton, Paul Tillich and other Catholic thinkers and theologians).

In fairness to Herr Ratzinger, he does not strike me as a militarist. And in fairness to his predecessor, JPII actively distanced himself from the notion of militarism. And while we're on the subject of being fair to the Pope, he's actually pretty ecumenical (although not as much as JPII). In fact, given Herr Ratzinger's extremism in most other areas, I would personally prefer him to be a bit less big on ecumenicalism, but that's also another story for another day...

Yet in the US, as perhaps in Europe, much of the Catholic tradition is understood only vis a vis its absolutely insane stance on birthcontrol and family planning matters in general.

I think it is valuable to the discussion to distinguish between the Catholic Church (i.e. the corporation and upper-level clergy) and Catholics in general. The former is - pretty much by definition - in agreement with Herr Ratzinger (or whomever else wears the silly hat at the moment). The latter run the gamut of walks of life and political positions. Put in these terms, the Church must be opposed - sometimes with the aid of the majority of Catholics - but the laity (is that the right word?) should be evaluated on their individual merits, which may run from the atrocious (think Ratzinger) to the agreeable (think Ken Miller or J.F. Kennedy).

I think (or at least hold the probably forlorn hope) that many Europeans are able to distinguish between the two. And I think that to any American with a political memory that goes back to Kennedy, the distinction should be crushingly obvious.

But contraception as well as abortion have almost become a 'signature' issue for the Catholic church--an identifier. Just as violent jihad has become a kind of signature issue or identifier for Islam. In both instances, it's actually fringe elements within the group that end up identifying and speaking for that group, which I think is the reverse of the special pleading that you're talking about.

The special pleading I was talking about is in the sense of the logical fallacy by the same name. This logical fallacy can be employed by both majority and minority groups.

Furthermore, I would question whether those elements are as much of a fringe as you seem to argue: Who was, for instance, the last US president who did not pay at least lip service to the Christian Right? Which Mideast government does not pay at least lip service to the radical jihadi? (OK, I can answer the last question, Egypt doesn't, neither does, AFAIK, Lebanon or Jordan. Syria, I don't know about. But I can't off the top of my head think of any other that don't occasionally toss the nutters a bone to keep them semi-contend.)

One last thing, I think you're mis-characterizing a generally persuasive argument that we have to address the political, social and economic roots of  terrorism if we ever hope to 'defeat it' [...]

That was not my intention. I fully support trying to understand what pisses people off. I merely argue that there are some things we should not compromise on simply to prevent pissing people off (or, for that matter, compromise on at all). For example, it is the inalienable right of any human being to ridicule religious leaders and religious icons, or political dittos. If this pisses people off, then we're just going to have to live with the resulting terrorism (and I mean 'live with' as in 'accept as a fact of life' not as in 'go bomb some brown people when it happens').

Understanding and addressing the roots of violent behavior in any society is ultimately about the survival of that society and doesn't have much to do with respect or disrespect at all; to want to understand what causes a terrorist's behavior and to try and address it is simply a mark of social and political sanity.

I mostly agree with that, except for the implicit premise that terrorism is a real threat to our society. As someone who posted by the handle of downunder newt said on DailyKos:

The overriding message which I'm trying to convey can be summarized like this:  Terrorism is not a legitimate threat to Westerners.  There are almost no terrorists in the world who want to kill us, statistically speaking.  We know this because any dispassionate examination of the state of Western society should be telling us that if there were large numbers of terrorists who wanted to kill us, we'd be under constant, unrelenting attack.  And we aren't, so there isn't.

I haven't run the numbers, but I strongly suspect that the number of terrorists is statistically indistinguishable from the number of people who take a shotgun into a high school and gun down their classmates. Bombthrowing lunatics will find something to hang their hat on whatever we do, so I don't see why we should compromise with them. By all means, try to find out what drives them. But why change policies for the benefit of less than .1 per cent of the population, who will likely be violent lunatics whatever we do?

- Jake

Ceterum censeo Chicago esse delendam