A lot of folks in the blogosphere right now are asking---why is it that Moslems are so touchy about being insulted?
After all, Christians are insulted all the time, and generally with much more scathing insults at that. But you don't see them beheading anyone, or even threatening the same.
The truth of the matter is this:
Moslems are basically allowed by the Cathedral's rules of engagement to do nearly any damned thing they want to without severe reprisal. This is because they're not considered white. Only whites are held to universalist standards, and only the wrong kind of whites (non-elite and non-SWPL) actually get punished with any real frequency for violations of said standards.
But back to the main point. The violence veto WORKS. In the final analysis, there are two moves in the cultural war, violence and ridicule. Ridicule trumps pretty much everything else, and is amplified by control over the media and cultural battlespace. Everything except...you guessed it...violence. The endgame of this is left as an exercise to the reader.
When your group's beliefs are subjected to ridicule, this lowers the status of its members with respect to the general society. This is especially true when you're the ONLY such group that people are allowed to ridicule. One might say there is in society a 'Law of the Conservation of Niggers'. That is, society must always have a certain number of niggers, bitches, or whatever you prefer to call them. Someone who occupies the rearmost seats of the bus. Until Jesus returns, some group or groups will ALWAYS be the niggers.
One might also formulate a 'Theory of Optimal Persecution'...which is to say the proper amount of persecution to level to maximally surpress and marginalize a group. Too much and you make martyrs, too little and they ignore you. Moslems in their early phases of conquest seem to have found the sweet spot for their populations of interest. The more courageous the population you're surpressing, ironically, the LESS harsh you should be (for instance, convert or die didn't work against the early Church when the Romans tried it, but convert or be a second class citizen and pay bonus taxes actually largely did over time).
Moslems get this, if only at a visceral level. They're not about to allow their religion to face the twenty centuries of mockery and scoffing and ridicule that Christians have. Let's face it, for most ordinary people, sacralized things and humor are like calcium and iron. They find it awfully hard to maintain the numenous, holy state of something in their mind if it has ever been the punch line or butt of a joke. Libertarians and the like just don't get this, because most of them are miles from neurotypical. How many ordinary people, for instance, can laugh at Monty Python's 'Every Sperm is Sacred', and still maintain an orthodox theology of the body?
If you can you're probably not neurotypical. There is reason why the Catholic Church used to censor the hell out of anything without its imprimatur. It wasn't because they were stupid.