I’ve heard such condemnation, yes, but most of it, while unequivocal, sounded a bit academic and perfunctory rather than gut-level and heart-felt. Overall, it would seem that those Danish cartoons caused a lot more genuine outrage among the Muslim community than 9/11.

But this may not be a fair characterization because (a) Muslims themselves are understandably scared of extremists within their own ranks, and this may keep many of them from speaking out as vigorously as they would otherwise, and (b) perhaps our media are reporting more extensively on Muslim outrage against perceived offenses to their religion than on worldwide protests against Islamic extremism, should such protests be occurring.

For a variety of reasons, it is very difficult to gauge the actual degree of Muslim opposition to Islamic terrorism. But I would guess that if some idiot burned a Qur’an in Times Square, the global Muslim condemnation of such act would be quite a bit more deafening than the condemnation of a Muslim blowing up a van and killing hundreds of people in the name of Allah.

Everybody’s afraid of these nutty jihadists, and it’s sad. Islamic architecture, for instance, is so beautiful, yet in Switzerland they voted to ban minarets, because everybody’s freaked out about that religion, and understandably so. It doesn’t matter that “most” Muslims are peaceful, if anytime you allow a Muslim community to live in your country, you inevitably admit a radical minority who will terrorize everybody, including their own.

Talking about Islam is like boarding an airplane. Anytime I board a plane, the thought of potentially crashing flashes through my mind. And everytime I talk about Islam, it occurs to me that anything I say about this religion may get me killed.

Chances are, I’m not the only person who feels this way.

As long as they’re accurate, I don’t mind labels. Makes it a lot easier to find stuff in the supermarket, provided that what it says on the box is actually in the box.

That’s a valid question, but my point was not whether those who commit certain acts are members of a particular religion, but to what extent their actions are religiously motivated.

As to who are the real terrorists, that depends on how one defines the term. If you choose to define it by body count alone, of late the U.S. has probably killed and maimed more innocent civilians by mistake (“collateral damage”) than the Islamist jihadists have killed on purpose. Clearly, far more people have lost their lives as a result of the American response to 9/11 than on 9/11 itself.

On the other hand, the U.S. are bending over backwards to avoid hitting innocent civilians, even though when you fire missiles into a city, you’re gonna hit the wrong people no matter how “surgical” those strikes are intended to be.

The jihadist nuts, on the other hand, specifically target innocent civilians, and the more they manage to kill, the more successful their operations.

The more innocent civilians U.S. forces kill, on the other hand, the more they’ve screwed up. I think if they could find a way to just take out the bad guys without harming anyone else, they would.

And therein may lie the difference.

The last decade was the 1990s. You may prefer to stay in this decade.

Determining the body count is difficult enough. Drawing conclusions from it as to who are the “real” terrorists—assuming one defines terrorism by body count alone—is even harder, as one must factor in the counterfactual casualty count and subtract it from the actual one.

In other words, if x-number civilians were killed in direct consequence of the U.S. invasion into Iraq, one must subtract from this figure the number of civilians that would have perished under the crazy Saddam regime had it been allowed to go on.

Likewise, one must attempt to quantify how much carnage was actually prevented by the U.S. disrupting and destroying various terrorist networks, but on the other hand factor in the extent to which U.S. action has served, and continues to serve, as a recruiting tool for new generations of jihadists.

The paradox is that these Islamist terrorists specifically target civilians and non-combatants, but at the end of the day they probably manage to kill fewer of them than Americans kill, even though Americans don’t want to kill anyone except enemy combatants. I believe the sincere and primary mission of the United States, whether performed correctly or not, is to stop violence.

Granted, it doesn’t make much difference to the poor little girl who got her legs blown off if she was targeted or hit by mistake in an honest albeit perchance misguided attempt to end violence.

Another way to look at it is that the U.S. use only a fraction of the firepower at their disposal. If Al Qaeda and like-minded organizations had access to the same miliary—including nuclear—arsenal, would they act equally restrained?

I don’t know. It’s certainly an unfortunate mess and a tragedy. I’m glad I can never be president, because I wouldn’t really know what to do.

Probably so. I guess we could trace everything to the first organic molecules in the primordial soup and go home.

Still, if a bunch of soccer hooligans set cars on fire because Manchester United lost the game, I call them soccer hooligans. And if a guy walks into a mall with a bomb strapped to himself because he thinks that way he’ll get his 72 virgins or grapes (or whatever he thinks he’ll get), I call him an Islamic jihadist, even though he and the soccer nuts may share quite similar underlying “human” dysfunctions.

Not sure if anything has been “resolved” by being deeply entrenched in a religious mindset, but atheism hasn’t exactly “resolved” anything, either. The latter may be more right on the money in factual terms, but I don’t see by what psychological mechanism exactly widespread despondency and hopelessness consequent upon the notion of no afterlife would make for a recipe for everlasting peace, either.

Human nature, alas, is human nature, and as such it is prone to and adept at seeking and finding justification for cruelty and violence in whatever philosophy happens to be within convenient reach.

Recall that some of the worst people and regimes in history weren’t driven by religion at all (Hitler, Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, Mao, etc.)

I have a hunch that the body count throughout human history would have been roughly the same even if religion had never been invented, although it is certainly difficult to ascertain objectively—i.e., leaving personal ideology aside—how often the notion of pleasing some god was the operative force behind manifestations of violence versus how many times the fear of divine retribution has actually stopped people from wielding their swords.

Still, anytime an act of violence occurs, we must log if religion may have been the driving force behind it. Simply to assert the a perpetrator would have blown up that truck anyway even had he been an atheist seems a bit speculative.

On the other hand, of course, we can’t log instances in which abstention from violence was religiously motivated.