Wolfgang is correct. If CarolC is right, then she has nothing to fear from any detailed examination of this vexed issue. Looking back through the dirty annals of racism, one finds endless prejudiced, hypocritical, biased, misleading and ill-informed assumptions - very similar to those she asserts are now being made about the fundamentalist tendencies of Islam. These were not dispelled by ignoring them but by challenging them through data - for example that white and black brains are exactly the same size, that black crime can be explained by low socio-economic backgrounds caused by the legacy of racism and so on.

If we had asserted that black people are complete equals without backing it up, then racists would have remained both vocal and unconvinced. As it is, anyone publically making a racist statement now has zero chance of supporting it through any objective means.

On the other hand if objective study shows that Islam does have deep internal problems (as opposed to reacting to external threats) then pinpointing these can only be good, because it will offer support to those Muslims already confronting these problems - for example the brave young woman who is currently in hiding because of death threats. These people are their religion's equivalents of Voltaire, Bruno, Luther and Tyndale and we should not pretend that they are struggling against nothing. Simply stating that the way to deal with this problem is a blanket denial that any religion can have problems particular to itself gets us no further.