First, a question linking Islam and violence wouldn't have gotten much traction in the U.S. even 25 years ago. "Islam... violence... huh?" would have been the general response. Yes, there were terrorists abroad then, murderously active, and anyone who bothered with the news knew who they were. They acted ruthlessly in the names of discredited ideologies and they fell into two groups.

On one hand, there were headline-grabbing bands of freelancers like the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Japanese Red Army faction and the neo-fascists who blew up the Bologna, Italy, train station in 1980. But the havoc they wrought paled before the state-sponsored terror inflicted on citizens who had the misfortune to live under brutal military dictatorships in Guatemala, Chile and Argentina, to name but three.

And really big violence? How about Cambodia, where an estimated million people died under the psychopathic social experimentation of the Khmer Rouge? Osama bin Laden and his imitators would have to go a very, very long way to rival the death toll run up by Pol Pot. (To say the very obvious, let's hope they don't.)

But about that second issue, the cultural one I mention above. I clearly recall a day last summer when, after staring at the front-page coverage of yet another suicide bombing in Baghdad, I turned to my local newspaper's entertainment section to find a very large photograph of a much-bloodied young woman screaming in what appeared to be the throes of a horrible death. It was only a movie, of course, reviewed for mass viewing.

Still, it got me thinking (as even small cultural icons can do for us) about similar, recent fare. There was that other film, reviewed in the Times, with this italicized postscript (explaining the R-rating): "You name it, this movie's got it: rape, immolation, cannibalism, dismemberment..." And then, a bit later, this information from another review in the same paper: "Joining the pantheon of stomach-churning devices is a rack that twists one's extremities until the bones pop out..."

Well, that's the free market, right? But maybe it bears reflecting on the fact that we ship these products, along with our computers and detergent, abroad for the enjoyment of people worldwide. And we do it from a place in which 32 people engaged in an activity we supposedly value--education--can be shot to death one spring morning in their classrooms. Under these circumstances, it may seem a little self-indulgent to wonder about whether "Islam" (as if there is such a monolith) is violent.