Talal Asad - on secular cruelty

Talal Asad wrote, in response to the Rushdie crisis:


In the West today, intolerance of Europe's Others has again become more strident. Collective cruelty is, of course, neither new nor confined to the West. Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians continue in our day to perpetrate acts of violence and cruelty. But it is the secular moder state's awesome potential for cruelty and destruction that deserves our sustained attention - as citizens and as athropologists of modernity.
from Genealogies of Religion, 1994, p. 306

Has subsequent history confirmed his analysis? It is hard not to think so. It is interesting that opposing cruelty is the very thing Rorty thinks secular liberalism has to offer the world...