I agree with you Ron. The Xmen had bigotry against mutants. As an allegory you could plug in whatever group you want. If the persecution of any group in our society is represented, it is the group portrayed in the origin story of the Magnito character. Even then, one to one, parallels are as you say, a stretch.

Obviously, as some one who hasn't seen Dark Knight, I'm not qualified to have an opinion about terrorism. ;-) but I think that the guy in the CBC article was saying that the movie was "post" 9/11, and that this Joker was written to play on our fear of terrorism.

In my mind, even that was a bit of a stretch. There were plenty of movies before 9/11 where the villains were terrorists. But I think what this guy is trying to get at, and what intrigued me the most was that this villain, this Joker, in the film was engaging in terror tactics for their own sake and not as part of any wider cause. If that is true, it is interesting and makes him a pure archetype of pure unexcused menace, such as Jaws' shark or Alien's Alien. I'm now, very much looking forward to the moving appear in my Blockbuster queue.