As Glenn Reynolds noted earlier this week, as a byproduct of Newsweek's debacle, big media is--almost four years after 9/11--just now coming to grips with the idea that Islam may have a problem. Glenn links to something Tom Friedman of the New York Times wrote:

The greatest respect we can show to Arabs and Muslims - and the best way to help Muslim progressives win the war of ideas - is to take them seriously and stop gazing at our own navels. That means demanding that they answer for their lies, hypocrisy and profane behavior, just as much as we must answer for ours.

While you can fault a religion that kills innocent people because of the fabulist writings of journalists on the other side of the globe, you can't fault how piously it considers its most holy book.

That's something that Hollywood--another big American media--doesn't seem to understand of this country's dominant religion. Brent Bozell writes that "Ken Woodward, the longtime religion writer of Newsweek, tried to explain to Christians just how offensive Koran-flushing is to Muslims: 'recitation of the Koran is for Muslims much like what receiving the Eucharist is for Catholics -- a very intimate ingestion of the divine itself.'":

There’s a certain irony here. If you wanted to see the Eucharist in the toilet, you needed only to watch the NBC sitcom "Committed" in February, when NBC played for laughs the idea that two main characters thought they accidentally dropped a communion wafer in a bar toilet.

Hollywood makes lame jokes and harsh satires of Christianity all the time, figuratively and literally tossing Jesus, the Bible, and church figures into the toilet. Those alleged American interrogators are pikers compared to Tinseltown. They could learn at the feet of the masters of mockery.

Last May on Fox’s "That ‘70s Show," one character explained to another: "You don’t get paid to be the best man. You do it for the satisfaction of nailing the hottest bridesmaid. It’s in the Bible." Religion is often mocked as fairy tales for fruitcakes. In a January 2004 episode of "The Simpsons," the daughter Lisa tells the son Bart, "The Mount Builders worshipped turtles as well as badgers, snakes, and other animals." Bart replies, "Thank God we’ve come to our senses and worship some carpenter that lived 2,000 years ago."

Anti-Semitic riots and hate crimes were endlessly predicted when Mel Gibson made "The Passion of the Christ." Frank Rich and all the other Gibson-bashers looked pretty silly when millions of Americans saw the movie, and the impending Kristallnacht didn’t materialize.

Read the rest. As Bozell notes, "So why doesn’t Hollywood produce storylines about the Koran being flushed down the john? That, they would tell you firmly, with conviction, would be religious bigotry."

Exactly.