But nevertheless you found it the right stuff in order to shut up a woman who defends the human rights of a persecuted minority.

There is no human right to not have your religion mocked.

But good try.

Nobody is arguing "religious privilege". You are inventing that. I am arguing (and consistently arguing so there is no possibility to misunderstand me) that there is a minority that is consistently persecuted and harrassed.

The corollary to that position is that dipping a crucifix in shit in public would be perfectly fine with you, since Christianity is not a persecuted minority religion. If that is in fact what you are arguing, then your position has more merit than I gave you credit for.

But that's not the impression I got.

I also think you're granting far too much weight to what the shrillest fundamentalist preachers are preaching (I don't accept that shrill fundamentalist preachers can speak for their laity, for the same reason I don't accept that the Pope can speak for Catholics). But I will grant that my perception of this discrepancy is based on the chronology of the Danish cartoon dustup, rather than reliable polling.

(The Danish cartoons were met with a Gaelic shrug by the overwhelming majority of Danish Muslims. They only became an issue when a handful of fundamentalist imams -who are even less representative of Danish Muslims than the Pope is of Catholics- went on a propaganda tour to a number of Arab countries with a doctored portfolio. That doctored portfolio included pictures they had found elsewhere, and a number of those pictures were actually offensive even to me. Cue major international incident.)

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.