He “accused Islam of ‘exalting violence,'” and they threaten to kill him. Doesn’t anyone notice the irony here?
From AFP, with thanks to Fjordman:
SAINT-ORENS-DE-GAMEVILLE, France, Sept 28, 2006 (AFP) “” A French philosophy teacher was under police protection Thursday after receiving death threats over an article he wrote in a national newspaper that accused Islam of “exalting violence”, school and police officials said.
Robert Redeker has not attended classes at his secondary school near Toulouse in southern France since September 19, when his opinion column appeared in the right-wing daily Le Figaro.
“He received written death threats in the form of emails. On the face of it they were pretty serious,” said the lycée’s headmaster Pierre Donnadieu.
Police confirmed the threat but refused to comment on the protection Redeker is receiving.
Under the heading “In the face of Islamist intimidation, what must the free world do?”, Redeker described the Koran as a “book of extraordinary violence” and Islam as “a religion which … exalts violence and hate”.
Likening Islam to Communism, he said that “violence and intimidation are the methods used by an expansionist ideology … to impose its leaden cloak on the world”.
“In the face of Islamist intimidation, what must the free world do?” Above all, not give in. Not stop speaking the truth. The fact that for all too many Muslims “violence and intimidation” are indeed the methods by which they impose their will has been proven again by the threats to Redeker. The way to respond to intimidation is not to allow oneself to be intimidated.
And Muslims who proclaim their moderation should make it clear that they reject all this, whether directed against the Pope, or Redeker, or Salman Rushdie, or anyone else. They should work against the beliefs and assumptions within the Islamic community that lead to this kind of intimidation. Or if they don’t, then rational observers will have every reason to suspect the sincerity of their moderation.