Voltaire said, "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it".

The concept of defending free speech to the death has faded a bit over the years.

According to the ACLU, "the First Amendment exists precisely to protect the most offensive and controversial speech from government suppression. The best way to counter obnoxious speech is with more speech. Persuasion, not coercion, is the solution."

That makes sense. But what happens when speech is backed up with the threat of fatwas, terrorism and the violent death of anyone who disagrees with the speaker? What about a form of speech that threatens to kill random innocents if anyone dissents? That form of speech is worse than coercive, it's even worse than hate. It's collective punishment, and it's a war crime.

Political Islam, in the form of the Ayatollah Khomeini, declared its right to collectively punish the west for our crime (under Sharia laws) of allowing free speech. Khomeini said:

"I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the Satanic Verses book which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death."

Since the west didn't care to stand up for free speech, Rushdie was forced into hiding and Khomeini's Islam was allowed to inflict collective punishment on innocent people. According to Wikkipedia:

At the University of California at Berkeley, bookstores carrying the book were firebombed. On February 24 in Bombay, 5 people in a protest at the British Embassy died from police gunfire. Several other people died in Egypt and elsewhere. Muslim communities throughout the world held public rallies in which copies of the book were burned. In 1991, Rushdie's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed and killed in Tokyo, and his Italian translator was beaten and stabbed in Milan. In 1993, Rushdie's Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot and severely injured in an attack outside his house in Oslo. Thirty-seven guests died when their hotel in Sivas, Turkey was burnt down by locals protesting against Aziz Nesin, Rushdie's Turkish translator.

The right to free speech is based on the rights of others to disagree. If others are too intimidated by a credible threat of violence to disagree, it's not free speech.

People who defend radical Islam's right to speak aren't defending free speech - they're defending radical Islams' right to wield the threat of collective punishment. People who apologize for offending radical Islam are apologizing to war criminals.

Like most war criminals, the Ayatollah Khomeini had no sense of humor. He said:

There is no room for play in Islam... It is deadly serious about everything."

Left-wing Iranian intellectual, Afshin Ellian, who knows how this form of Islam works, says:

Hereby I call upon all artists, writers and academics to stop discriminating against Islam. When on television and in hundreds of theatres jokes are being made about Islam, and when academics will start treating Islam more critically, then Muslims will learn tolerance. The terrorists can intimidate and eliminate a handful of critics of Islam, but they can never kill hundreds of critical minds.

Come on friends, and enter the brothels and torture chambers of Mohammed A. and Allah, you will find great inspiration there. Come on, fellow academics, put Islam on the operating table of philosophy. Otherwise it will remain a question of how many murders our society can deal with.

Jyllands-Posten illustration

Jyllands-Posten illustration

According to these apologists, "Islam" is offended by any representation of the prophet. If that's true, then why didn't anyone riot over this image, published decades ago, using Mohammed and the Angel Gabriel to sell meat extract?

illustration of Angel Gabriel, Mohammed and meat extract

How about these clip art images?

Let's face it, images of Mohammed have been around for many years, and religious Islam hasn't made much of an issue of it.

However, political Islam, meaning the Wahhabists and Salafists, make a very big issue of it. According to Khaled Abou El Fadl of the UCLA School of Law, this "supremacist puritanism in contemporary Islam is dismissive of all moral norms or ethical values. Its main purpose is not to integrate particular values within Islamic culture, but to empower Islam against its civilizational rival."

The protests against these cartoons are not a demand that we respect a religion. They're a threat of collective punishment, and they're part of the Islamist war against us. We have nothing to apologize for.

Well, that's not true. We should only apologize for the fact that we have not pasted the Jyllands-Posten images on every available media outlet and surface of the free world.

Pro-Palestinian cartoonist Steve Bell has admitted that "the Muslim Fatwa is something of a deterrent when portraying Arabs." At least Bell has the courage to admit that he's a coward. The UN has never had that kind of courage.