embarrass the very name of “religious liberty” and endanger our national security. Anti-Muslim bigots and their public apologists must be vigorously opposed by Americans who recognize the value of a religious voice in the public square and the imperative that all Americans be treated equally under the law, whether they are religious or irreligious, Christian, Muslim, or Jew.

What made Schmitz’s article rather awkward was the fact that many of these sharia alarmists — Mark Steyn, Andy McCarthy, and Daniel Pipes, to name only three — are among the most prominent writers for National Review. Predictably, anti-Islam activist Andrew Bostom took to the NRO‘s blog to denounce Schmitz as “willfully uninformed,” although his intervention consisted of a set of standard-issue talking points giving no indication that Bostom had even read the original piece. (As Schmitz noted in his reply, Bostom didn’t seem to notice that some of his talking points had already been rebutted in the piece.) This led Bostom to issue a second, more ill-tempered response in which he accused Schmitz of trafficking in “shallow, non-sequitur argumentation” and being “well marinated in cultural relativism.”

In the meantime, other NRO writers had gotten in on the fracas, with David French — a hawkish Christian Zionist lawyer and leader of the group Evangelicals for Mitt — providing a rambling defense of Bostom, while Ramesh Ponnuru — among the smartest and most prominent conservative pundits — attacked French and defended Schmitz’s original piece.

Why is any of this important? Simply because the controversy provides a hopeful (albeit highly tentative) indication that some on the religious right — and particularly the Catholic right — may be starting to stand up to the Islamophobic hysteria that has taken over much of the conservative movement. Perhaps uncoincidentally, both Schmitz and Ponnuru are Catholic, as is Robert George, the right-wing academic and movement power broker who has similarly called on Christians to “defend religious liberty for Muslims”. Prior to Schmitz’s article, his magazine First Things — which has no formal religious affiliation but has always been primarily Catholic in orientation — recently published another attack on anti-sharia laws by Robert Vischer.

Of course, it is nothing new to see religious Catholics, or the Church itself, take positions far to the left of the American conservative movement on foreign policy or economic issues. But the First Things crowd is notable in that it has always skewed to the right of most American Catholics and cultivated close ties with the conservative movement. Richard John Neuhaus, the magazine’s late founder, went from a left-wing opponent of the Vietnam War and campaigner for civil rights early in his career to a right-wing supporter of the Iraq War and proponent of a “clash of civilizations” between Christendom and Islam by the end of his life. Similarly, Robert George has all but urged fellow Catholics to abandon their (often-left-leaning) views on war or social justice and focus exclusively on issues related to abortion and sexual mores. (Rick Santorum is perhaps the classic example of this combination of conservative Catholic social mores and ultra-hawkish neoconservative foreign policy.)

In recent months, this group has raised an enormous outcry over the alleged violation of religious liberty inherent in the Obama administration’s contraception mandate. I confess that I have always been skeptical about whether their primary concern was really for “religious liberty” in general as opposed to Christian values in particular, and whether they would support the same sweeping conscience exemptions for Muslims that they were espousing for Christians. The current pushback against sharia hysteria on the right doesn’t provide a full answer to these questions — but it is at the very least a hopeful sign that the Catholic right might be willing to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to defending believers of other faiths.

Today, National Review Online‘s David French leapt to the defense of Spencer and Horowitz. His aim is to show that far from being Islamophobic, they and their allies are simply applying the same standards to Islam that we would apply to any other religion. To do so, he resorts to a familiar kind of thought experiment, asking how we would respond if Christians posed the same sort of threat to the U.S. that Muslims ostensibly pose.

But French’s “thought experiment” is perhaps more revealing that he intended. Its astonishingly hyperbolic portrayal of the extent of the “Christian” (i.e. Muslim) threat only reinforces the conclusion that he and his allies hold a hysterical and alarmist view of Islam.

French’s imaginary account of the “Christian” menace is too long to reproduce in full here — read the full post for that — but the gist is: “Christians” (i.e. Muslims) have launched 10,000 terrorist attacks against the United States in the span of a decade. They control five states “in whole or in part,” having wrested sovereignty away from the U.S. government, and are fighting a violent insurgency to take control of California. Anti-blasphemy laws are enforced “at rifle point,” members of other religions are crushed under tanks, and the last synagogue closes as Jews have been expelled from the United States.

Clearly, French expects readers of this fantasy to nod in knowing recognition. How clever, they are meant to think to themselves — he’s precisely described the Muslim threat to America! And to be sure, much of what he describes is modeled on recent events in various Middle Eastern countries.

But for the thought experiment to make sense — and for his defense of Horowitz, Spencer et al to hold water — one must believe that these events are a plausible account of the threat posed to America by radical Islam. And here the paranoia on display becomes so over-the-top as to be laughable.

After all, have Muslims launched 10,000 terrorist attacks in America? Have they launched 1,000? Have they launched 100? Do radical Muslims control five American states, “in whole or in part”? Do they control a single state? Do they control a single county? Has a Muslim anti-blasphemy law been passed by even a single jurisdiction in the United States? Has even a single Christian or Jewish religious congregation been forced out by Muslims? (This last notion is especially ironic, since French’s allies have been dedicated to preventing Muslims from opening mosques throughout the country.)

There is nothing wrong, of course, with faulting the governments of many Muslim-majority countries for their illiberal practices. But to suggest, as French seems to, that Muslims are on the verge of imposing an Islamic Republic in America is frankly insane. (Once again the Bircher parallel holds: it was perfectly justifiable to denounce the brutality of the Soviet regime, but it was lunatic to suggest that a Soviet takeover of America was imminent.)

French may have intended to clear Horowitz and Spencer from the charge of Islamophobia. Instead, he has given yet another demonstration of the depths of anti-Muslim paranoia prevailing on large segments of the right.