David_Gerard:

I find it difficult to deal with the claim that posting a link to a horrible news story - the factuality of which is entirely accepted - constitutes unacceptable bigotry.

Obviously, this is them blaming me for pointing out serious conflicts that are already present in their own thoughts and feelings. It still strikes me as offensively stupid to an extent I have no intention of putting up with if in any way avoidable.

I haven't seen the concrete details of the debate you describe and I'm not claiming that what I'm about to write applies to this case, but generally speaking, conclusions like those of your Facebook correspondents are not always unjustified. (I mean the feeling of hostility they perceived, not the rationalization you ascribe to them.) When someone points out the faults of some particular party and expresses outrage, even if all the stated facts are true, there are still two additional important issues.

First, placing a strong focus on someone's faults is likely to be interpreted as an expression of deeper hostility, and statistically speaking, this interpretation is often correct. To take an extreme example, imagine if someone wrote a book titled The Crimes of the Elbonians, in which he documented every bad deed committed by any Elbonian individual or institution throughout known history. Even if every claim in the book is factually true, an Elbonian would reasonably infer hostility, possibly threatening hostility, on part of the writer (as well as his target readership). Of course, such reactions are often biased in that they overestimate the level of intended hostility, or even detect it where there really is none. (On the other hand, I don't think any individual is entirely free of such biases when it comes to all aspects of one's identity.)

Second, and more important, when discussing the faults of some institution, it is practically impossible to do it without making additional assumptions and implications about the difficult questions of the assignment of blame, both individual and institutional. Again, I don't think anyone is entirely free of biases in this regard, in the sense that everyone will apply somewhat inconsistent standards to the faults of his favored and disfavored institutions. (One will also likely bias one's judgments by using a distorted model of how a given institution actually works.)

With this in mind, even if the reactions of these people were severely biased, I think one should be very careful before one places them into the "offensively stupid" category. Of course, what I wrote also has more general implications for the main topic of the original post.