Free You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom by Nick Cohen Page A

against racism to cover criticism of religion. Or rather, they extended them to cover arguments about minority religions in Western countries. It remained open season on Christianity for liberal writers and comedians, even though Islamist pogroms in Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt and Iraq and communist oppression in China made Christianity the most persecuted of the major religions.
    Writers taking on religious themes, journalists writing about Islamist extremism, or police officers, teachers and social workers investigating the abuse of women, knew that they now ran the risk of their opponents accusing them of a kind of racial prejudice. The charge of ‘Islamophobia’ would not always stick, but its targets understood that their employers would take it seriously and their contemporaries would regard them as tainted until they had cleared their names. The accusation was not always fatuous. As the millennium arrived, racists and nativist conservatives, who hated Muslims because they were immigrants or came from immigrant families, could develop the most unlikely interest in human rights. If liberalism gave them a new means of attack, they were prepared to feign an interest in it. The only principled response to their hypocrisy was to oppose racism and radical Islam in equal measure and for the same reasons. The best conservatives and liberals managed that, but most settled into the ruts described by a liberal Muslim think tank in 2011. ‘Sections of the political left have not done enough to challenge Islamism, yet, encouragingly, they have challenged anti-Muslim extremism,’ it said. ‘Similarly, sections of the political right have been reluctant to challenge far-right extremism yet are willing to challenge Islamism.’
    The fear the Ayatollah generated among liberals thus operated on several levels. Critics of religious obscurantism, most notably liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims, feared violent reprisals. Beyond the worries about direct threats lay the fear that religious groups, bureaucrats, left-wing politicians and newspapers would accuse critics of insensitivity or racism, and that racist groups or websites would confirm the accusation by repeating their critiques. The fear of the vilification and ostracism that would follow was often the most effective deterrent against speaking out. ‘Society can and does execute its own mandates,’ said John Stuart Mill. ‘It practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.’ He might have been writing of modern Europe.
    The nature of intellectual life made retreat the likely option. Whatever radical postures they strike, writers and journalists in Western countries are not the equivalents of soldiers or police officers. Nor are they members of a revolutionary underground. They do not begin an artistic or journalistic career expecting to risk their lives. They do not work in well-protected police stations or military bases alongside colleagues who have access to firearms. They work in university campuses or offices, or, in the case of many authors, at home surrounded by their families. Rushdie’s marriage broke down under the strain of the fatwa. Police moved the couple fifty-six times in the first few months, and his wife walked out. The desperate Rushdie tried everything to persuade his pursuers to let him live in peace. He apologised to Iran and converted to Islam. Nothing worked. His enemies just laughed at him and pressed on with the terror campaign. Should other writers spend years in hiding with no hope of escape? Did they want to see their relationships disintegrate, as Rushdie had done?
    They could rely on the police for protection, but only up to a point. Ordinary criminals, including ordinary murderers, want to escape from the scenes of their crimes. Visible