Let's re-visit how it began and we turned into cowering, quivering jellyfish

Dr. Daniel Pipes takes us back to 1989 and to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses and how it all started with the cavemen from Pakistan doing their screeching hullabaloo and then one of the mad clerics in Iran, who sees  the screeching monkeys on TV, decides to do one better by issuing a fatwa.  Pipes wants to remind us how our hold on free speech has eroded over the years by giving in time and time again to tyrannical maniacs. Great article and worth your time.

From a novel by Salman Rushdie published in 1989 to an American civil protest called "Everyone Draw Muhammad Day" in 2010, a familiar pattern has evolved. It begins when Westerners say or do something critical of Islam. Islamists respond with name-calling and outrage, demands for retraction, threats of lawsuits and violence, and actual violence. In turn, Westerners hem and haw, prevaricate, and finally fold. Along the way, each controversy prompts a debate focusing on the issue of free speech.

I shall argue two points about this sequence. First, that the right of Westerners to discuss, criticize, and even ridicule Islam and Muslims has eroded over the years. Second, that free speech is a minor part of the problem; at stake is something much deeper – indeed, a defining question of our time: will Westerners maintain their own historic civilization in the face of assault by Islamists, or will they cede to Islamic culture and law and submit to a form of second-class citizenship?......


h/t: PamB