Western journalists and intellectuals' reaction to what the columnist Charles Krauthammer has called the "studied frenzy over the Danish Muhammed cartoons" in the Muslim world is by no means an isolated event, nor should it be a puzzling one. In fact, the Western Left has had a remarkably consistent and predictable set of attitudes toward religion in recent decades. The contrasting treatment of Muslims on the one hand, and of Christians and Jews on the other, reveals the real priorities of the Western Left and their most immediate political concerns.

In a recent column, Krauthammer pointed out that the Western press and intellectuals have shown no sympathy at all when people have created and distributed works openly insulting Christianity, such as the so-called art exhibit "Piss Christ." The same is true of popular culture. NBC had planned to run, on the night before Good Friday this year, an episode of Will and Grace in which the rock singer Britney Spears portrays a Christian TV personality who presents a cooking segment called "Cruci-Fixin's." The episode was canceled after protests by Christian groups, but the offending term in fact has already appeared on the Fox comedies The Simpsons and Arrested Development.

Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center has extensively documented the negative treatment of Christians on American network television, for those who may still harbor any doubts about the matter. In addition, Bozell astutely pointed out that, whereas the report that American soldiers had deliberately flushed pages from the Koran down a toilet caused a furor among the U.S. press (as well it should), not a peep was heard a couple months earlier when an NBC-TV comedy depicted two characters flushing a Eucharist wafer down a toilet, in a scene meant to be humorous. Part of the difference in reactions can be attributed to the difference between fact and fiction, but even those whose job is to watch television, the TV columnists, failed to identify this scene as offensive.

This silence and sometimes open sympathy toward attacks on Christianity and Judaism is now the default position among most of the Western press and intelligentsia. When Christians, Jews, and their ideas are attacked, the Western Left and their journalistic catamites typically stick their fingers in their ears and shout "freedom of the press!"

The treatment of Islam has been quite different. One need only recall the urgent pleas, after the 9/11 attacks, of the Western press that the American public not hold Islam and Muslims in general responsible for the attacks. They argued strongly that the terrorists did not represent Islam, and they stated that Islam in itself was no danger to the West. Similarly, the U.S. press initially scoffed at the notion that the D.C. sniper might be a Muslim who supported the aims of al Qaeda, and when it turned out to be true, they gave the matter only a tiny fraction of the attention they would later pay to Pat Robertson's apparent call for the assassination of Panama's president.

There is a serious difference between the two cases -- but it is even more damning of the U.S. press's treatment of them. Robertson's claims, being utterly silly and having led immediately to a firestorm of opposition in his own country, could never lead to violence, whereas sniper John Allen Muhammed's beliefs did exactly that. Similarly, the widely feared assault against American Muslims after the 9/11 attacks never came. Muslim words of hatred of the West, by contrast, led to the 9/11 attacks and many others, yet the connection between Muslims' statements and the "clear and present danger" of action upon them has been continually minimized by the Western Left and their satraps among the press.

Whereas U.S. Christian leaders are immediately and vociferously criticized for any unwise or dubious statements, such as Pat Robertson's (as they should be), even more extreme pronouncements and actions by Muslims go largely uncriticized. Just this week, for example, as reported by Palestinian Media Watch, the Hamas website presented a video statement by a suicide bomber saying, "We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood, and our children's thirst with your blood. We will not leave until you leave the Muslim countries."

Of course, that statement came from Palestine, not the United States, and was the product of admitted terrorists. Still, one would think it might raise some eyebrows among the Western press, especially as it is fully representative of many such pronouncements publicized in mainstream Muslim media around the world.

Why, then, are Western intellectuals and their bag carriers so concerned about the sensitivities of a decidedly alien people living thousands of miles away in self-created nightmare conditions when these same Western eminences are so unmoved by the concerns of their Christian neighbors? (And those neighbors, incidentally, are the ones whose principles led to the modern idea of freedom of the press.)

In explaining why the Western press go easy on Muslims and Islam, Krauthammer wrote, "What is at issue is fear. The unspoken reason many newspapers do not want to republish [the cartoons] is not sensitivity but simple fear. They know what happened to Theo van Gogh, who made a film about the Islamic treatment of women and got a knife through the chest with an Islamist manifesto attached." The Westerners' sensitivity, Krauthammer says, is simply an attempt to keep the Islamic hordes' anger concentrated on the Danes and the few other European newspapers that reprinted the cartoons.

I believe that fear is indeed at the heart of the matter, but it is the imminence of that perceived danger, not the ultimate possible consequences, that drives the Western Left's differing reactions to Islam as opposed to Christianity and Judaism. The Western intellectuals certainly know that Islam presents a danger to their way of life, but the threat appears quite distant and attenuated at this time. Hence, they believe that they can dismiss Islamic rage as no real, immediate concern. They figure that if radical Muslims do anything really terrible to us, as they did five years ago, we can always get behind our government in a concerted response as we did then, while the fear-adrenaline was still coursing through our veins. That should stop the problem.

In addition, they reason, most Muslims are moderate and really don't want to kill us, and they certainly don't want to be bombed and crushed under Westerners' tanks because of a few big-mouthed religious fanatics in their midst. We can count on their good sense to stop the radicals among them, and if that fails, our government will step in and threaten the bad guys with serious retaliation, at which point they will retreat with their tails between their legs and resume murdering people in Indonesia, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Africa, and other places that don't affect us.

In short, Western Leftist intellectuals believe that Islam is a threat, but a distant one and relatively easy to defeat.

Christians and believing Jews, by contrast, are all around us, the Western Left observes, and these particular religious fanatics pose an immediate threat to our freedom. These homegrown theocrats want to force us to have replicas of the Ten Commandments on our courthouse lawns, to hear people pray in our forcibly tax-supported schools, to have voters (instead of the Supreme Court) decide what a human life is and how it should be protected, to teach children that Darwin's theory is just a theory, and other such instances of their repulsive Western version of Sharia law.

Those people must be stopped, and now, and any way we can undermine their faith is a very good thing indeed, think the Western leftists and their lapdogs in the media. That is why there is this disconnect between the Western press's treatment of Islam and its attitude toward Christianity and Judaism.

In Europe, the waxing of Islam and waning of Christianity in recent decades have led to the initial signs of a changing European assessment of the two religious traditions. The rise of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn (slain in 2002 by a left-wing environmentalist who claimed to have done so in support of Europe's Muslims), the French government's granting of increased police powers to local communities to combat the Muslim riots of last fall, and the willingness of several European newspapers to reprint the Danish cartoons of Muhammad suggest that the continent is moving toward a realization that Islam is antithetical to European liberalism and that the Continent must begin doing something about it.

Given the enduring power of Christianity in the United States and the weak foothold of Islam here, it seems likely that it will take something much more dramatic to change attitudes among the American Left and their bully boys in the press. Undoubtedly that dramatic event will have to be a horrible catastrophe of some sort, which is tragic in itself.