New Daily Standard Article: "The Freedoms We Fight For"

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

I previously blogged about the threat to Omar Sharif that was posted on a jihadist website after the actor spoke glowingly about playing St. Peter in an Italian TV film.  I've also noted on this blog that Sharif isn't alone in being threatened for allegedly offending Islamic sensitivities; rather, there is a disturbing trend of people being threatened, and sometimes killed, when radical Muslims take umbrage at their speech.  Now "The Freedoms We Fight For," an article I wrote for the Daily Standard that documents and analyzes this trend, has been posted.  An excerpt:

The van Gogh murder further extended this battle against free speech.  Shortly before his death, van Gogh directed a film called Submission, which was designed to dramatize the mistreatment of women born into Muslim families.  In response, Islamic radical Mohammed Bouyeri murdered van Gogh on November 2, 2004, shooting him six times before slitting van Gogh's throat with a kitchen knife and then using the knife to impale a five-page note to his chest.

While the Rushdie and van Gogh incidents are the two most prominent attacks on critics of Islam in the last two decades, they are only part of a broader trend.  The note that Bouyeri gruesomely tacked to Theo van Gogh's chest also threatened Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch MP from a Somali Muslim background.  By that time, however, death threats were old hat to Hirsi Ali.  She has said in an interview that she was living underground just weeks before her 2003 election to the Dutch parliament because of comments she had made in a televised debate.

According to Hirsi Ali, she was provoked during that debate and ended up blurting out, "It's my religion, and my culture, and I can call it backward if I want."  But the real problem, insofar as the radical Muslims who threatened Hirsi Ali were concerned, wasn't her criticism of Islam, but her admission that she had left the faith.  Many Muslims believe that apostasy from Islam is punishable by death, and the threats that Hirsi Ali received drove her into hiding.

Read the whole article here.

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