Thank you very much for a very thought-provoking blog. I’d been pondering on this for some time and I was finally able to pin down my response. My answer to this is that you’re right, it isn’t good to coddle people who are so easily offended.

The caveat to this is that we need to pull the mote from our own eye before we can start condemning the Muslim extremists for their behavior.

We are guilty of our own extreme actions, based on our own offended sensibilities. The FCC is handing out random fines to the media because some conservative family groups get offended and launch a campaign to complain. We gasp in horror as a bare breast is exposed during a football game, but there’s no outcry against ubiquitous violence in a television series. We’re so terribly offended by an entire subculture’s choices that we propose a constitutional amendment to ratify discrimination against them, while at the same time we applaud our chief executive for using federal funds to support a particular religious mindset.

Most of the time we’re not as violent as the Muslims who get offended, but that’s just most of the time. We’re not shy about maiming or killing homosexuals, and we’re not at all ashamed of the fact that we’ll bomb a former ally when it serves our purpose. We use rallying cries of “9/11″ and “for the children” to justify our retribution for being offended, but how does this make us any better? Just because our god is bigger than theirs? We are directly responsible for the deaths of more Muslims than the reverse; surely that must mean that God is on our side.

The Muslims who riot and kill in the name of their god are contemptible, but they’re no worse than our own religious fanatics who attempt to use the government to force their morality on the unwilling. The Muslim extremists, at least, are honest about their methods. They may be trying to kill us, but they’re not trying to tell us it’s for our own good.