> Erm... thats not what I'm talking about. When Irish Catholics Gasoline Bomb British cities, people don't use the actions of the violent IRA as a denunciation of Christianity as a whole.
Firstly I would argue that other people in this thread doing just that. Well usually not the actions of the IRA, though the terrorist attacks against abortion clinics are mentioned (they were against buildings, of course, not people), and things like the crusades or the founding of America. Usually to advance the case of atheism by implying moral equivalence of all religions, and of course neglecting that atheists, specifically 20th century communist state atheists are by far the biggest terrorists and warmongers in history, certainly where death toll is considered. Christianity is in fact pretty far down the list when it comes to deadly ideologies. Certainly far below atheism.
Examples from just this thread:
> Don't forget Islam and Christianity along with many other religions also actively promotes violence. In the west we tend to whitewash things, but for a less controversial example if you look at say Peter Pain or fairy tales there very different pre Disneyfication.
> If you look at the century centered on 1500: Just finishing 400 years of named-as-such Crusades, conquering much of the world in the name of Christ, violently repressing non-Christians in the areas it controlled, and getting started with religious wars between various factions of western Christianity which would be particularly prominent through the 17th Century.
> Western christianity didn't leave all violence behind, see for example anti-abortion violence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence#United_S....
And so on ...
Secondly, an answer to that I often hear is that that's because making the case that Jesus was a terrorist is utterly impossible. An annoyance to the government, sure. A rebel ... if you seriously stretch the truth, you can probably make him a rebel. Making the case that muhammad was a terrorist (leader), sending out assassins, raiding parties and the like ... doesn't seem very hard at all. Not sure if he ever sent out suicide attackers though.
This is also the story you keep hearing about terrorist recruiters. There's a reason terrorist recruitment amongst muslims works much better than among, say, christians or hindus or buddhists or ..., and that reason is differences in the ideology.
But all of these facts are beside the point. Our society cannot possibly tolerate even a tiny minority of terrorists (and it will get worse over time : just think of what might happen if we discover portable and easy fusion power while having a small minority of terrorists among ourselves). Right now we still have margin, but it's blatantly obvious that that margin is eroding over time.
Equally plain is that there is a breaking point where moral, social and political arguments are completely beside the point. Given the public reaction to this attack, I don't think we're that close yet, but we're getting closer. People would not respond at all if they didn't think it a threat, so in that view the demonstration is an escalation, even though I doubt Al Qaeda sees it as such. Also I'd be willing to bet that the French police, whether the agent is muslim or not, will effectively treat muslims worse because of what happened to Ahmed Merabet. It is no different from what happens if the mafia kills a police agent, but of course it will be felt by innocents just the same.
But when demonstrating fails to stop terrorism and new attacks occur, public opinion will shift to include other solutions to terrorism. It seems to me we are maybe half a dozen shifts away from attacking groups ... Of course there are 4-5 terror attacks by muslims per week (thursday ... Charlie Hebdo, friday ... massive attack and massacre against a Nigerian town, Saturday ... suicide bombings one in a public market in Nigeria and one in Lebanon (Tripoli), Sunday ... two people beheaded on tape in Zuweid, Egypt). At that rate it could happen suddenly and really, really quickly.
If you think about WWII and later the cold war, it would absolutely not be the first time that even America's state turns against minority ideologies that exist in their population, and the same is true in other countries. It's not like more than a tiny minority of US-Japanese would kill for the emperor, for instance.