Those who want to treat Islam differently to all other faiths see Muslims as lesser citizens.
First the horror, then the silence. It’s been a week since Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage in New York, the 33-year-old fatwa finally catching up with him, and the mood is strangely muted. There have been some powerful defences of free speech in the media and statements of solidarity with Rushdie, who is still in a hospital bed nursing life-changing injuries. But in general our political and cultural elites have managed only limp, anodyne or oddly delayed interventions – in Labour leader Keir Starmer’s case it took him a full day to say anything about the attempted murder of a fellow knight of the realm. Meanwhile, the culture warriors – those wont to downplay the threat of Islamist extremism and dismiss free speech as a racists’ charter – are keeping remarkably schtum.
