The Freedoms We Fight For

Or, cringe like pitiful dhimmis.

The unheralded Islamist assault on free speech.
by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

.....NOT SURPRISINGLY, THE ISLAMIST attack on free speech is even more successful outside of the West. There are numerous examples of people in the Middle East and elsewhere being silenced or seriously threatened because of allegedly offensive speech. In 2002, for example, the governor of Nigeria's Zamfara state issued a fatwa calling for the death of journalist Isioma Daniel after she suggested that, had Prophet Muhammad been alive, he may have wanted to marry one of the beauty queens at the 2002 Miss World pageant. After Daniel's article, riots by Muslim youths left more than 100 dead and 500 injured, and the pageant's organizers were forced to move it out of Nigeria. Daniel appears to be living in hiding to this day.

Another example is Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, who had a fatwa issued against her in 1993 after the publication of her novel Lajja (Shame), which depicted the persecution of Bangladesh's Hindu minority. The Hindustan Times recently reported that Nasreen "had to leave the country overnight to save her life and his been on [the] run since then."

UNFORTUNATELY, WE IN THE WEST haven't always been vigilant about standing behind speech rights. Too often, when Islamists threaten free expression, some Westerners clamor to make excuses for them. In 1997, for example, Salman Rushdie and novelist John le Carré had a high-profile feud in the letters section of the Guardian. In the course of the feud, le Carré said that Rushdie bore the responsibility for the bounty on his head because "there is no law in life or nature that says that great religions may be insulted with impunity."
.....[read what came before and the rest please -- Me]

CAIR has been more successful in silencing the opposition than Joe McCarthy ever was.