(SNIP)

Let there be no mistake. There is a bloody war being waged on atheism. And it is time for us all—especially we liberals and Muslims—to show some of that solidarity we rightly expect from others.

Societies should be judged by how they treat the weakest among them. But over recent years this laudable liberal concern for minorities has been exploited by organized community voices with a vested interest in maintaining the tribal group identity they claim to represent. These ghetto-chieftains have so bedazzled our sensibilities that some of those who used to consider themselves progressives have become the staunchest defenders of regressive social and political practices within minority communities, in the name of cultural tolerance.

One of the consequences of this betrayal of liberal values has been the stifling of dissenting voices from within minority communities, which is why, let me repeat this, these minorities-within-minorities are the most vulnerable, and none more so in today’s climate of rising extremism than atheist and ex-Muslim voices.

...For if liberalism is to mean anything at all, it is duty bound to support without hesitation the dissenting individual over the group, the heretic over the orthodox, innovation over stagnation and free speech over offense. So let us all write on these topics. Rather than allowing jihadists to shut down debate, it must proliferate so much that they simply cannot kill us all. In this way, let us spread the risk associated with free speech. Or, as John Maynard Keynes would say, let us “appear unorthodox, troublesome, dangerous, disobedient to them that begat us.”