UK
The Guardian: "A Europe without blasphemy is back in the middle ages..."
16/02/15 11:32
“...Though the Copenhagen attack was a shock, it didn’t come as a surprise. As French cartoonist Plantu told me recently when we were chatting in his office at Le Monde in Paris: “This is just the beginning. There will be more attacks.” Unfortunately, I think he is right. This will be a long battle, first and foremost a battle of ideas. The erosion of the crucial distinction between words and deeds – between an image that some may find offensive and actual violence – has created a climate in which “blasphemers” are required to bear responsibility for violent attacks subsequently directed against them. I experienced that myself in 2006 after commissioning drawings of Muhammad published in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Denmark, and I have tried to explain the mechanisms at work in my book The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech. There are people who seriously believe that the organisers of the Copenhagen debate asked for trouble. This is partly due to a new grievance fundamentalism. It heightens the sense of insult and offence, according it enormous social power.”
Read more
Read more
The Spectator: 'Religion of peace' is not a harmless platitude To face Islamist terror, we must face the facts about Islam's history
24/01/15 18:25
“...The ‘cartoon wars’ — which began when the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten published a set of cartoons in 2005 — are part of that. But as Flemming Rose, the man who commissioned those cartoons, said when I sat down with him this week, there remains a deep ignorance in the West about what people like the Charlie Hebdo murderers wish to achieve. And we keep ducking it. As Rose said, ‘I wish we had addressed all this nine years ago.’
Contra the political leaders, the Charlie Hebdo murderers were not lunatics without motive, but highly motivated extremists intent on enforcing Islamic blasphemy laws in 21st-century Europe. If you do not know the ideology — perverted or plausible though it may be — you can neither understand nor prevent such attacks. Nor, without knowing some Islamic history, could you understand why — whether in Mumbai or Paris — the Islamists always target the Jews...”
Read more
Contra the political leaders, the Charlie Hebdo murderers were not lunatics without motive, but highly motivated extremists intent on enforcing Islamic blasphemy laws in 21st-century Europe. If you do not know the ideology — perverted or plausible though it may be — you can neither understand nor prevent such attacks. Nor, without knowing some Islamic history, could you understand why — whether in Mumbai or Paris — the Islamists always target the Jews...”
Read more