Monday 16 February 2015

Christopher Hitchens on the cultural fatwa | Vanity Fair

"To indulge the idea of religious censorship by the threat of violence is to insult and undermine precisely those in the Muslim world who are its intellectual cream, and who want to testify for their own liberty—and for ours. It is also to make the patronizing assumption that the leaders of mobs and the inciters of goons are the authentic representatives of Muslim opinion. What could be more "offensive" than that?"
Me: I'm not too sure why this old article by the late, great, Christopher Hitchens was in my Google Islam alert today, but for sure it's worth rereading for both its elegance and for its relevance to today's ructions over free speech and those who would kill it, literally.