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Concepts of freedom of expression and the laws designed to protect it were born in Europe’s blood-soaked history of interfaith warfare, mostly between Catholics and Protestants. The (atheistic) French Revolution aimed to “de-Christianize” France in order to smash the (temporal, wealth-based) stranglehold the Catholic Church had on the country. The Founding Fathers well knew how the state could use religion against the people; hence, the First Amendment safeguards both freedom of speech and freedom of religion by forbidding Congress to enact laws abridging the exercise of either. The Abrahamic faiths have never been simply matters of conscience; they have always served as weapons to impose control, especially over women and their bodies, sexual minorities and education. Weapons need to be kept under lock and key, or better yet, eliminated.

A surfeit of slipshod thinking and befuddled verbiage has complicated our discourse about both the Charlie Hebdo and Lars Vilks affairs. Notwithstanding logic and the damage done to our prospects for self-preservation, we avoid frank talk about Islam – the main faith today inspiring terrorism. It helps no one to hurl poppycock slurs such as “Islamophobe” or Islamophobic” at those who talk forthrightly about this. And remember, unless you solemnly believe in the Quran, there is nothing – absolutely nothing — in it to “respect.” (The same goes for the Bible and the Torah, of course.) Attempts to shield religions from censure in the face of overwhelming evidence – President Obama leads the pack of invertebrate Western politicians doing this — amount to nothing more than pandering acceptance of ancient myths, harmful ideas and the increasingly gruesome violence to which they often lead. Ideologies merit no a priori respect; people do.

Or, as Shevchenko put it succinctly to me later in our talk, “We [progressives] surrendered when we accepted the word ‘Islamophobia.’” She paused. “People hurt my feelings every day. But there’s no such thing as the word ‘feministophobe.’”

We have, in fact, begun surrendering in the West, and not just by buying into the notion that criticizing Islam is tantamount to attacking Muslims as people. We should shiver with revulsion at the example of multicultural “tolerance” with which the United Kingdom has furnished us. There, for Muslims who turn to them (for women, this is not necessarily a voluntary move), 85 Shariah councils dispense “justice” in “family matters” – marriage and divorce, inheritance and domestic violence. That is, in matters in which girls and women are most vulnerable. (A campaign is underway to abolish the councils.) In pursuing this path of “tolerance” the United Kingdom has traduced Muslim women hoping for a decent life in a “developed” country, including those who just want to keep their clitorises safe from the savage ritual of female genital mutilation. The U.K. outlawed this in 1985, but families often send their young daughters back to the home country for a “vacation,” during which local butchers set to work slicing off their clitorises and sowing up their vaginas – at times without anesthesia. A 2003 law would throw parents in jail for 14 years for forcing such a “holiday” on their daughters, but so far, no one has been convicted. The practice continues.

Who came up with the idea of establishing Shariah courts in the land of Shakespeare and Byron? Not Muslims angry at being discriminated against. No, none other than a good Christian “man of the cloth” – the bland sobriquet should really be one of foul opprobrium — the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams. In 2008 Williams declared that such a sickening “beau geste” toward (radical and not so radical) imams would lead to better “community relations.” This is the sort of “multicultural tolerance” beloved by all those “men of faith” (of whatever sect, and I do mean men) who slyly scheme or openly militate for the second-class status of women, for interference with a woman’s right to do as she pleases with her body, for the stigmatization (or worse) of sexual minorities, for a culture of shame attaching to sex, and for the child-abuse teaching in schools of ludicrous explanations about our entirely non-celestial origins. With bishops like Williams, who needs imams for enemies?
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