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I think the special status of Islam in the West is only partially explained by concerns of cultural sensitivity. No other religion or faith group has the same degree of coddling, and I find it hard to see any explanation other than the fact that Islamists are willing to commit violence if they feel their religion has been besmirched (see relevant Onion image.). Similarly, when it comes to racial issues, the groups that get the greatest degree of toleration and indulgence from the state are those that are most willing and able to take to the streets and engage in civil disorder.
This is not because Western governments are supportive or tolerant of civil disorder - quite the opposite. There is a keen (if sometimes sublimated) awareness in Western governments of their weakness when it comes to combating internal disorder. Simply put, we no longer have the state capacity to engage in large scale reprisal violence against citizens, even disobedient ones. The only reason this hasn't led to the collapse of governments is that this same decline in state capacity for violence has been mirrored by a reluctance among the wider population to engage in large-scale civil disobedience. In this regard, I disagree with your claim that Western states could really crush even the violent minority of Islamists if they wanted to; policies like collective punishment, reprisal violence, mass deportation, and so on are utterly anathema to the liberal sensibilities of both the modern state and its officers. Even if it were in the interests of the state and its officers to enact such measures, we are incapable of doing so. Consequently, minority groups that have the persistent ability to commit violence against the state must be bought off by any means necessary, while more widespread currents of disorder must be preemptively quashed, because their manifestation would be fatal to the collective game of make-believe that underwrites state power.
I should also clarify that I think the real risks of a persistent gender imbalance in politics don't take the form of violence directed specifically against women or aimed against women's influence in politics. The more plausible scenario of concern is one in which a large majority of men, especially young men, feel alienated by political outcomes and take matters into their own hands - a politics of gender, but not about gender. In such circumstances, the underlying gender gap in political outlook would be an implicit rather than explicit consideration, motivating young men to violently pursue political ends that on an object-level have nothing to do with masculinity or femininity.
At risk of going off topic, I think the treatment of Islam has more to do with projection than fear or enforced groupthink. While I’m not really a “right side of history” person and I think the idea is dumb, I do think that Islam is on a similar trajectory as Christianity in the sense that for a while similar images would produce violence - but that was a few hundred years ago perhaps. So eventually there will be more tolerance and less radical extremism, but a lot of people in the West think they are already there or have somehow hoped it into existence.
I’m not totally confident however because there are some quirks of Islam that make it unique. Not only the Sunni-Shia split but also the nature of religious thought and organization as well as things like a ban on artistic representation. It still shocks me that Islamic countries basically didn’t even have theatre which most every other culture does have in some form!
Christian religious violence in the modern and early modern era was mostly state sanctioned. There really is a big difference between Christianity and Islam in terms of proclivity towards non-state violence.
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Okay, good clarification. I largely agree with this. However, I think the unwillingness to deal with violent Islamists has gone hand in hand with an unwillingness to be "racist." Muslims quickly figured out that they could get away with things that normal citizens could not.
As for a movement of seething, dissatisfied young men becoming radicalized - possible, I guess. Discontented young men are always a recipe for instability, but for all the raging about feminism from the manosphere, I don't actually think Western men are that disadvantaged or that hard up.
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