[Riot]

And here's an interesting viewpoint from Glenn Greenwald at Salon. In part:

And then there's the more amorphous but arguably more significant self-justifying benefit that comes from condemning "Muslims" for their violent, extremist ways. I'm always amazed when I receive e-mails from people telling me that I fail to understand how Islam is a uniquely violent, supremely expansionist culture that is intrinsically menacing. The United States is a country with a massive military and nuclear stockpile, that invaded and has occupied two Muslim countries for almost a full decade, that regularly bombs and drones several others, that currently is threatening to attack one of the largest Muslim countries in the world, that imposed a sanctions regime that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslim children, that slaughters innocent people on a virtually daily basis, that has interfered in and controlled countries around the world since at least the middle of the last century, that has spent decades arming and protecting every Israeli war with its Muslim neighbors and enabling a four-decade-long brutal occupation, and that erected a worldwide regime of torture, abduction and lawless detention, much of which still endures. Those are just facts.

But if we all agree to sit around and point over there -- hey, can you believe those primitive Muslims and how violent and extremist they are -- the reality of what we do in the world will fade blissfully away. Even better, it will be transformed from violent aggression into justified self-defense, and then we'll not only free ourselves of guilt, but feel proud and noble because of it. As is true with all cultures, there are obviously demented, psychopathic, violent extremists among Muslims. And there's no shortage of such extremists in our own culture either. One would think we'd be more interested in the extremists among us, but by obsessively focusing on Them, we are able to blind ourselves to the pathologies that drive our own actions. And that self-cleansing, self-justifying benefit -- which requires the preservation of the Muslim-as-Threat mythology -- is probably more valuable than all the specific, pragmatic benefits described above. All this over a "menace" (Terrorism) that killed a grand total of 25 noncombatant Americans last year (McClatchy: "undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism").