Last week, in response to the recent terrorist attacks in Paris aimed at a satirical newspaper company that published a cartoon criticizing Islam, many individuals chimed in to condemn these acts of terrorism and defend the right of the newspaper agency to be able to publish without fear. Others made sure to point out that we should not condemn the entire religion of Islam because of these attacks, and that the “Islamophobic” attitude of Western democracies was to blame for agitating Islamic extremists to act in such a manner. With all of this in mind, it’s clear that a certain double standard exists in our society when it comes to open criticism.

Throughout my time here at The University of Alabama, I have read many articles in this newspaper where the focus of the article was to criticize a specific group based on the ideas that this certain group espouses. In our country, where the freedom of speech is written into our Constitution, we’re used to this. We expect criticism, and we expect to be able to criticize others who we do not agree with. Often, however, our criticisms are sadly dictated by popular opinion and political 
correctness rather than reason and logic.

For example, we see so many individuals, writers, politicians and others take aim at the Catholic Church because the church opposes things like birth control and abortion. It has become commonplace to see nasty comments about the Pope and other Catholic leaders, and often these comments are even accepted and seen as normal in the realm of “intellectual discussion.” Ultimately, though, these criticisms are usually just based on certain unfounded and predisposed prejudices of the criticizer. It’s easy for our society to criticize the Catholic Church – since it opposes many of the things that our society has come to accept – without thinking about whether these things are healthy for a society or not.

But where is the criticism of the leaders of certain Middle-Eastern regimes, regimes that treat women as property and imprison and kill those who do not support their regimes? The regimes that exemplify the repressive patriarchy that left-wing academics in this country wish to destroy? Extremist Muslims unfortunately seem to be a protected by a shield of political correctness, when it comes to open criticism, because we are afraid of offending Muslims in general. Why is it ok to take cheap shots at the Pope for following his religion but not ok to call out a Muslim extremist for acts of terrorism? Is it because we think that the latter will get you a death threat, whereas the former will get you a weekly column at Salon.com? If that’s not cultural ignorance and gross stereotyping, then I don’t know what is. Of course the vast majority of Muslims are not violent extremists, but our inability to stand against those who are has been hampered by this shield of political correctness, 
ultimately leading to grave and deadly consequences.

Joe Puchner is a sophomore majoring in mathematics and Spanish. His column runs biweekly.