To put the difference starkly, if al-Qaeda launches violent attacks against Western targets, some might conclude that this is due to an inherent quality in Islam and that, by extension, all Muslims are prone to violence because all Muslims are fundamentally the same. By contrast, when Anders Breivik, a self-identified Norwegian Christian, went on a killing rampage in and near Oslo in July 2011, Christianity and Christians as a whole were not implicated in his crimes.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on asymmetric moral attribution and the racialization of Islam versus other religious groups. SEED: Potential essay angle: how media framing assigns collective guilt by religion asymmetrically, using the al-Qaeda/Breivik comparison as an anchor.

Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Intro…, loc. 54