The fate of Messrs. Badawi and Merabet is a reminder that the vast majority of human beings subjected to tyranny under the radical and harsh interpretation of Islam in vogue today are Muslims. The issue for Americans and freedom-loving people everywhere, then, is how to cast this war in a way we can live with—and win.
This is what George W. Bush and Howard Dean—and yes, Ben Affleck and Bill Maher—were trying to do, each in his own way. But this fight isn’t between liberals or conservatives in the context of U.S. politics, and it certainly isn’t between Islam and Christendom or between atheists and people of faith. It’s between those who believe in free expression—the font of all other freedoms—and those who don’t.
One way those in the West can make this clear to our enemies is to put our own house in order. That means several things, starting with the mainstream U.S. media dispensing with the fiction that they didn’t run the Danish cartoons—and won’t run the Charlie Hebdo cartoons even now—because they are loath to offend their readers. They offend readers all the time, and happily. They aren’t running them because they’re afraid to do so, a quite rational fear. In addition, it’s long past time to dismantle the witless university speech codes championed by feminists, gay right advocates, identity-politics mavens—and even the Obama administration.
It also means, and this is counterintuitive given the anti-Semitism embedded in modern Islamic society, dismantling Europe’s “hate speech” laws. These statutes were enacted with Nazi Holocaust-denial in mind, a noble goal. But they undermine the principle that free speech should be inviolate and that all other freedoms flow out of it. Certainly, the enemies of free thinking know this.
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