Not Good: Catholic Priest Shot in Turkey

The name Archduke Ferdinand won’t unstick itself from my head. This isn’t helping.

An Italian Roman Catholic priest was shot dead in his church in the Turkish Black Sea city of Trabzon on Sunday, triggering condemnation from Turkey's government and pledges to track down the killer…

Turkey, like many other Muslim countries, has seen protests in many cities and towns over the past week against cartoons published in several European newspapers depicting the Prophet Mohammad.

Turkish leaders have expressed strong distaste at the cartoons, but have also called for calm and better understanding between different cultures and religious faiths…

Violent attacks on Christian clergy are virtually unheard of in Turkey, which takes pride in its history as a bridge between mainly Christian Europe and the predominantly Muslim Middle East, and which also gave shelter to Jews over many centuries.

Maybe it’s not connected; maybe it is. Nonetheless, I feel uneasy.

Also making me uneasy is the rightwing having seized on this as yet another opportunity to denigrate all of Islam and make more pronouncements which ever so thinly veil their belief that the war on terror is really a holy war. (Malkin is going particularly, if characteristically, haywire.) I remain unimpressed with any demonstrable inability to separate extremist elements from mainstream expressions of a kind, Islamic or otherwise.

That said, I’m also not totally comfortable with one part of Atrios’ quite reasonable reaction:

I'm not too sympathetic with the notion that anything under the cover of religion is automatically entitled to deference. On the other hand, "don't be an asshole" about peoples' religious beliefs when they aren't trying to impose them on you seems to be reasonably good etiquette. The cartoons weren't funny and the visual portrayal of Mohammed was done just to "be an asshole" without any larger point to it. It's like parading around in blackface just for the hell of it. There's no point other than "I'm doing this to see who I can piss off." I certainly defend the right to piss people off, though not always the decision to do so.

Clearly, the highlighted statement is right, but I'm not totally sure I would classify radical Islamists as not trying to impose their religious beliefs. I believe that is, in fact, one of their primary goals, both religious and political, which makes me inclined to feel that commentary on those goals, even in the form of cartoons likely to offend, is fair game, and therefore defensible. (The flipside of that is that I find this response of radical Muslims, including calls to kidnap Danes and "cut them into as many pieces as the number of newspapers that printed the cartoons,” and assertions that this conflagration never would never had erupted “if a 17-year-old death edict against writer Salman Rushdie been carried out” because “then those lowlifers would not have dared discredit the Prophet,” indefensible.) I’m a bit concerned that in our attempts to rebuke the rightwing onslaught to denigrate all of Islam as fundamentally violent, we have begun to minimize the reality that there is indeed a segment of Islam that actively seeks to convert infidels and slaughter those who refuse. It strikes me as dangerously naïve to ignore the ambitions of an extremist Islamic element who, given the first opportunity, would happily impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us, and just because a jihadist hasn’t knocked on one’s door peddling their wares doesn’t make it any less true.

None of that, by the way, changes my feelings one iota about the best ways to combat extremist Islam or fight the war on terror or any associated policies. I’m not suddenly radicalized. I just think it’s a useful distinction to make.

For what it’s worth, I’ve taken on board the colonialist arguments offered on Muslims’ behalf by Gilliard (hat tip to The Green Knight, who excerpts and links here), and I’m not completely sure how it works into my thinking at this point, except to note that I’m not convinced that’s the primary impetus.

Anyway, I've been thinking a whole lot about this, actually, and trying to work through a lot of conflicting feelings about it. I’m thinking aloud, as it were. Feel free to object, or point me in directions I haven’t gone yet.

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