They tend to be fine with insulting and finding fault with Christians. But everyone else’s beliefs are out of the bounds of serious scrutiny in our diverse and multi-cultural society.

Good thing for the corrective of ‘alternative media’ and the better reaches of the blogosphere. GetReligion has some interesting scrutiny and commentary.

Especially this clip from NYU’s Irshad Manji on the media attempt to whitewash the Muslim identity of a terrorist:

MANJI: Understanding requires analyzing, not sanitizing. I’m not interested in hysteria. It’s clear that we have to be careful not to reduce this story to Islam but the corrective to that is not to whitewash Islam from public discussion of the story altogether. It’s to put the role of religious conviction in its proper perspective. And by the way, we won’t know what that proper perspective is until all the details have come in. But in and among those details has to be the detail that Major Hasan visited radical Islamist web sites, that he had email exchanges with an extremist preacher, that he reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” before he opened fire on comrades, that he told fellow community members that he did not wish to fight fellow Muslims. So my point simply is that this is a complex case but complexity is not served by, you know, excising certain factors out of the equation merely because you’re uncomfortable with them.

Time’s Nancy Gibbs has some good analysis on the equation, and how it presents us a whole new set of problems.

For eight years, Americans have waged a Global War on Terrorism even as they argued about what that meant. The massacre at Fort Hood was, depending on whom you believed, yet another horrific workplace shooting by a nutcase who suddenly snapped, or it was an intimate act of war, a plot that can’t be foiled because it is hatched inside a fanatic’s head and leaves no trail until it is left in blood. In their first response, officials betrayed an eagerness to assume it was the first; the more we learn, the more we have cause to fear it was the second, a new battlefield where our old weapons don’t work very well and our values make us vulnerable: freedom, privacy, tolerance and the stubborn American certainty that people born and raised here will not reject the gifts we share.

Even as the President weighs how to fight the wars he inherited, he and the entire U.S. security apparatus will have to figure out how you fight a war against an enemy you can’t recognize, much less understand. In that sense, the war on terrorism has left the battlefield and moved to the realm of the mind.

The nature of terrorism is changing, says one of Gibbs’ sources, and this Time article is a hopeful sign that at least some of the media are willing to look at that and talk about it.

Soldiers sacrifice to keep us safe; somehow we failed to keep them safe. It would be grim news for the intelligence community and the Army if they just missed all the warning signs. It would be worse news if they saw but chose to ignore them.

Everyone learned big lessons from this horrible event. Everyone can see we have to change the way we do things. Even some of the media.