“Islamophobia”

In 1979, comedian icon John Cleese sat across from the Bishop of Southwark and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge on BBC’s Friday Night, Saturday Morning, defending his troupe’s film Monty Python’s Life of Brian against charges of blasphemy. Calm, articulate, and fiercely secular, Cleese argued that religious institutions should never be immune to satire, ridicule, or robust critique. For many years, this battle often defined Cleese’s public persona: a classic British liberal, an iconoclast fighting back against the conservative Christian establishment of the 20th century.

Raymond Ibrahim is an American author and historian specializing in the history of Christianity and Islam. He studied at California State University and also took graduate courses at Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. He pursued PhD studies in medieval Islamic history at Catholic University of America. A former associate fellow at Middle East Forum, he is currently a Visiting Fellow at Danube Institute. Ibrahim is the author of several widely discussed books, including Sword and Scimitar and Defenders of the West, and he has translated and edited important primary sources on jihad and Christian martyrdom under Islamic rule.

For those banged up in Britain’s high-security prisons, the reminders that life hangs by the thinnest of threads keep coming.

Earlier this week, a court heard how murderer Donald Gaote-Oueyeya stabbed the neck of a fellow prisoner in HMP Frankland.

Fearing that his victim, an alleged gangland boss, had ‘put a price on his head’, the 26-year-old fashioned a blade from a piece of cutlery and launched an attack ‘without warning’.