…The image of Mohammed’s turban containing a bomb implies that all Muslims are violent maniacs – an untrue and dangerous nonsense. But free speech is not the freedom to be nice. It is the freedom to be offensive, foolish or even racist, or it is nothing.
Yet many of my friends and political allies were not reacting by stating these obvious truths. They were – to my astonishment – turning on the terrified cartoonists, saying they should never have drawn Mohammed at all. A poisonous cliché sprang up: that this was a fight between “liberal fundamentalists” and Islamic fundamentalists, two equally extreme sides that reasonable people should reject. Do these people really believe there is moral equivalence between a system of free speech that protects everyone – Muslims included – and a superstitious taboo that proposes to erect a wall around one man and silence all criticism of him?
Read it all here.
Comments are closed.