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.

With those preliminaries aside, a few thoughts:

1) It’s become clear that Breivik’s political views were drawn in large part from the writings of “anti-jihad” writers in Europe and the U.S. I’ve written about many of these writers in the past — folks like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Mark Steyn, Andy McCarthy — and it’s fair to say that I don’t have much sympathy for their views; I think they’re ignorant, bigoted, and frequently hysterical. But ignorance, bigotry, and hysteria are very different from the mass murder of innocent civilians. So while it’s perfectly legitimate to fault the Gellers and McCarthys of the world for fostering an atmosphere of apocalyptic alarmism about Islam, let’s be clear that none of them has ever legitimated or called for anything resembling Breivik’s actions.

2) But if the “anti-jihadists” are within their rights to object to being tarred with Breivik’s actions, one would nonetheless hope that the atrocity in Norway would prompt some degree of introspection on their part — some reflection on how it was that this person (however crazy or evil) took their work as justification for mass slaughter. Unfortunately, such introspection has been in short supply. Mark Steyn and Andy McCarthy have typically glib responses, in which they breezily deny that there might be any connection between Breivik’s politics and their own.

Their arguments are unconvincing and in places downright silly. Can Steyn actually believe, for instance, that just because Breivik’s victims were white Christians the entire Islamophobia angle on the killings is therefore simply a distraction? As even a cursory skimming of Breivik’s writings will show, Breivik’s main criticism of the European ruling elite is that they are too decadent, relativist, and multiculturalist to stop the threat from Muslim immigrants. (They’re “supporters of European multiculturalism and therefore supporters of the ongoing Islamic colonisation of Europe,” he writes at the beginning of his manifesto.) Perhaps this might ring a bell for Steyn, since he’s written a book arguing precisely the same thesis. (It’s also striking how many of the keywords — “lack of cultural self-confidence,” “national suicide” — are the same.) Insofar as we can perceive a motive for Breivik’s attack, it appears to be that the mass slaughter of the future Norwegian political elite would be a shock that would force Europe to awake to the Muslim threat.

3) As always, the double standards involved in the treatment of Muslim and non-Muslim terrorists are highly revealing. Molly Ziegler Hemingway, for instance, attacks the media for labeling Breivik a “Christian extremist.” He may be both a Christian and an extremist, Hemingway suggests, but there’s little evidence that his Christianity was a central cause of his rampage — he’s more of an extremist-who-happens-to-be-Christian. This is a fair point, but it’s striking that such logic virtually never gets applied to Muslim militants — “radical Islam” is trotted out as an all-purpose explanation regardless of the militant’s specific beliefs and grievances. (Witness the Fort Hood shooting, where the right was eager to downplay all of Nidal Hasan’s concrete political grievances and to focus on his religion as the sole and sufficient cause of his rampage.)

Similarly, it’s been revealing to see so many of the “anti-jihadists” draw a strict differentiation between violent and non-violent forms of politics, and suggest that even if Breivik shares many of their political goals, his use of violence utterly differentiates him from them. Again, this may be a fair point — but it’s precisely the distinction that they frequently deny when it comes to Muslims. Andy McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad, for instance, argues at great length that the threat from Muslim violence is largely a red herring, that the more insidious threat is from religious Muslims pursuing their goals peacefully through the political process, and that these peaceful Muslims (or “peaceful” Muslims, to adopt his gratuitous use of scare quotes) should essentially be viewed as no different from the terrorists. Of course, applying the same logic to the anti-jihadists would suggest that there’s little distinction between a McCarthy on the one hand and a Breivik on the other. If McCarthy and his compatriots don’t like this conclusion (which I myself don’t share) then perhaps they should reevaluate the premises that led them to their Islamophobic alarmism.

As it happens, I agree with the Corner-ites’ opposition to Graham’s proposal, if not their hysteria about the ongoing Islamization of the West. But it’s worth looking a little more closely at the logic of Graham’s proposal. Graham and his close ally John McCain have frequently tried to cast themselves as a “vital center” on issues of torture and civil liberties, but in fact they have proved themselves to be reliably right-wing on these issues; in particular, Graham has been a vocal opponent of civilian trials for terror suspects and of accountability for Bush-era officials involved in the torture of detainees. His belief that the First Amendment might have to be sacrificed in the name of the war on terror is not some out-of-character lapse of cultural confidence; rather, it’s of a piece with his generally stated view that fighting terror should take precedence over civil liberties at home.

Steyn and McCarthy profess to be shocked — shocked! — that the Bill of Rights might be abridged for American citizens as a result of what’s going on “over there.” But in fact, Graham’s proposal is rather mild compared to the views of, say, John Yoo, who suggested in a notorious October 2001 memo [PDF] that the President during wartime can override the Fourth Amendment — and by implication, the entirety of the Bill of Rights — at will, provided he deems it necessary for the war effort. (Graham at least seemed to be proposing that the First Amendment should be restricted through legislation rather than presidential fiat.) Of course, Yoo’s analysis has since been repudiated by the Justice Department, and he was later reprimanded by an internal Justice Department report investigating his conduct during the Bush years. But since leaving the Bush administration he’s been welcomed with open arms by the American right — not least, National Review, which has brought him on board as a contributor along with Steyn, McCarthy, and Stuttaford. If Steyn and McCarthy, at least, have expressed any misgivings about Yoo’s analysis, I haven’t seen them. (Stuttaford is more reliably libertarian.)

Like much of the American right, Steyn and McCarthy seem to have no objection to rescinding the constitutional rights of American citizens provided it only happens to “them” (brown people with funny names) and not to “us” (nice, patriotic white people). They might want to consider, however, whether this is really a tenable line — or whether, as Graham’s proposal suggests, the slope is more slippery than they would allow.