The "Islamic Inquisition" and the Blasphemy Police

by Douglas Murray • October 13, 2015 at 5:00 am

There is a small but undeniable number who are willing to kill and sometimes die in the cause of imposing their idea of blasphemy on non-Muslims around the world.
The editors signalled that they had had enough of the threats and enough of the danger. They censored themselves.
Today there might be thousands of people willing to publish cartoons of Mohammed on their Twitter accounts, but most of them hide behind aliases and complain about the cowardice of others.
Our societies like to think that terrorism and intimidation do not work. They do -- or can -- but only if we let them.

Stéphane Charbonnier, the fearless editor and publisher of Charlie Hebdo, who was murdered on January 7 along with many of his colleagues, is shown here in front of the magazine's former offices, just after they were firebombed in November 2011.

Ten years ago, one of the editors of a Danish newspaper called Jyllands-Posten had heard that that no cartoonist in Denmark would depict Islam's prophet for a set of children's books on the major world religions. Did such self-censorship really exist in modern Denmark? He sought to find out. So he published a spread of twelve cartoons intended to depict the founder of Islam.

Attacks on the newspaper followed -- the most outspoken attempt at enforcing censorship since the death threats against Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1988, and the murder of Theo van Gogh for his film, Submission, in 2004. The knife in van Gogh's back also went through a note demanding death threats for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch MP at the time, and the Dutch MP, Geert Wilders.