That there is a “line” between satire, commentary, legitimate criticism, gentle mockery and so on, and harmful disrespect negating the rights of persons, unacceptable bigotry, “hate speech”. That it is possible to say when this line has been crossed, and when it has not. That the issue is always whether or not the line has been crossed. That it is, variously, a question of degree, stance, intent or geopolitical context (that it is significantly less OK to say mean things about Muslims than it is to say mean things about Scientologists, even if a roughly equivalent level of meanness is involved).

That the line circumscribes a zone of inviolable integrity; that crossing it is violation, and will inevitably provoke violence in response (Bonhoeffer’s concern that torture would induce violent hatred in its victims, an implacable desire for revenge arising from their wounded bodily integrity; Dworkin’s meditations on bodily integrity in Intercourse, her writing as theatre of revenge). That what is circumscribed by the line is sacred, is the sacred itself. That liberalism, “neo-” or otherwise, is driven to colonise and defile the sacred; that this defilement is presented as the work of enlightenment, shining light into dark places; that enlightenment, so understood and practiced, is thus a synonym for colonialism. That the retaliatory violence of those whose sacred spaces have been so violated is resistance to colonialism, legitimate self-defence, and should be supported.

That the sacred, the bodily and the territorial are equivalent with respect to the line and the meaning and consequences of its violation. That blasphemy is not only metaphorically invasion (or that invasion is only ever metaphorically invasion: that territorial violation is always metaphorically bodily violation and profanation of the sacred, and that the metaphors are interchangeable). That “Koran abuse” is thus contiguous with physical abuse, blasphemy of the body; that “where one burns books” - The Satanic Verses, for example - “one will inevitably burn people”.

(That this is evidently not so: how many unsold paperbacks are pulped and incinerated every year? Are these paperbacks not vessels of the sacred? What is the correct procedure for disposing of unsold paperback copies of the Koran? Or of The Satanic Verses? Does a book only become sacred when someone has paid for it?)

That Dworkin’s Scapegoat lays out this metaphorical schema as the ideological foundation of Zionism, and simultaneously shows how such bodily-territorial instantiations of the sacred rely on the mechanisms of scapegoating and exclusion to shore up their factitious integrity. That this might give pause to some leftist allies of political Islam; that perhaps they might consider universalising the principles behind their anti-Zionism; that they have nothing to lose by doing so, except perhaps for some of their political Islamist friends.

That both a Zionism and a political Islam are imaginable that would not fall directly into the trap of territorializing the sacred and violently scapegoating and excluding the profane, dirty, leaky feminine of the Freikorps officer’s imagination. That the trap would nevertheless remain.