Chip Bok's Bokbluster

The New York Times and some others are worried that the murder of cartoonists by radical Islamists will cause offense – to Islamists.

Brendan O’Neill in National Review calls fear of an Islamophobic backlash “a myth”.

Liberals’ instant, almost Pavlovian response to Islamist terror attacks in the West is to worry about a violent uprising of the ill-educated against Muslims.

Islamophobia is a code word for mainstream European elites’ fear of their own populations, of their native hordes, whom they imagine to be unenlightened, prejudiced, easily led by the tabloid media, and given to outbursts of spite and violence.

Muslims against radical Islam

Glenn Harlan Reynolds in USA Today says, “the most significant criticism of Islam in past weeks came not from traditional critics in Europe, but from inside the Islamic world itself, in the form of a speech, little-reported in the West, by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to Muslim clerics in Egypt.

Al-Sisi commented:

“I am referring here to the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing — and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before. It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (Islamic world) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!

“That thinking — I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!

“Is it possible that 1.6 billion people (Muslims) should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants — that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost — and it is being lost by our own hands.”

The Muslim mayor of Rotterdam seems to be on board with al-Sisi.

And if you do not like it here because humorists you do not like make a newspaper, may I then say you can f*** off.

“This is stupid, this so incomprehensible. Vanish from the Netherlands if you cannot find your place here. All those well-meaning Muslims here will now be stared at”.

Victor Davis Hanson says the obsessive fear of offending other cultures a form of appeasement that leads to cultural suicide.