The difference between Islamism and the rest is that liberals are happy to denounce white extremists, while covering up militant Islam with the wet blanket of political correctness. They do not confine themselves to saying that, of course, society must protect people from being murdered for their religion, as Slobodan Milosevic murdered the Bosnian Muslims, and punish employers who refuse jobs to members of creeds they dislike, as Protestant employers in Northern Ireland once refused to hire Catholics. They maintain it is illicit to criticise religious ideas. Thus, along with the admittedly faint fear of violence, western writers who want to provide arguments against religious misogyny, homophobia, racism and censorship must also live with the fear that their contemporaries will accuse them of orientalism or Islamophobia.
The world may pay a price for the monumental blunder of treating religious ideologies – which are beliefs that men and women ought to be free to accept or reject – as if they were ethnicities, which no man or woman can change.
Nick Cohen writes:
at the start of the battle 23 years ago there was a tiny regard for the forms of legality, even among those who were otherwise happy to condemn free thinkers to death. However brutal they were, they respected their version of due process.
Not true, Nick.
What these religious leaders did was use the legalities of non-Islamic nations as cover.
The murderers of those 53 people killed for their part in publishing “The Satanic Verses” (as well as innocent collateral dead) could not be pinned on the ones ORDERING the fatwa.
Only the perps themselves were to be punished under Western law.
And this is the same ”out” used to cover up the orderings of death fatwas in all parts of the world right up til today.
Only the perps get punished.
Never the instigators.
Never the giver of the Friday ”sermon.”
And how convenient for thse imams that Western law most often likes to label these rabid Muslim murderers as ”crazy” rather than looking for a reward in Paradise, as is promised for any man who completes a death fatwa?
But Mr. Cohen is correct in that these latest Pakistani killings are NOT about blashemy.
A change is in the air in Pakistan.
Non-Muslims MUST either flee, convert or die.
Dhimmitude (the protected status of the debased non-Muslim in a Muslim land) is no longer available to them.