There was a dust-up in the right-leaning blogosphere this week after Glenn Reynolds made the following observation about why folks appease Islam:

It’s because people are afraid they’ll blow things up.
Sooner or later, you know, fundamentalist Christians are going to pick up on this lesson, engage in similar behavior, and make similar demands. Because, apparently, it works fine.

This prompted Bryan Preston at Hot Air to respond no, they won’t:

I get the warning and humor of this line, but frankly I’m tired of it.

Mr Preston is right on the specific point: Stage a play with a gay Jesus and Catholics will demonstrate on the sidewalk. Stage a play with a gay Mohammed and your head will be on the receiving end of a rusty scimitar all over the Internet. That won’t change.

But Prof. Reynolds is right on the larger point. As I say in my book:

Even in low level conflicts there’s no monopoly of depravity: Americans think of “Northern Ireland” as being the IRA versus the Brits. But it doesn’t stop there: there were plenty of “loyalist” paramilitaries, too, groups that took the view that if the other side was blowing up their civilians maybe a little reciprocity was in order.

That will almost certainly be the case in the years ahead. If violence and the credible threat thereof gets you respect, then other groups will adopt that tactic. It’s not hard to foresee some of the neo-nationalist parties emerging in Europegoing down that route – or to predict that pan-Islamism will be only one of several transnational pathologies seeping across borders with ease. The appeasing of one faction eventually liberates others. As in Ulster, there’ll be groups who think the state power is too wimpy to hit back, and will make their own arrangements. There will be plenty of non-state actors on the non-Islamic side.