Mark Steyn on the Origins of Tolerating Intolerance

Mark Steyn gave this brief history of the blunt instrument of “Islamophobia” in a speech at Hillsdale College in March, as recorded in Imprimis Magazine:

Every day of the week, somewhere in the West, a Muslim lobbying group is engaging in an action similar to what I’m facing in Canada. Meanwhile, in London, masked men marched through the streets with signs reading, “Behead the Enemies of Islam” and promising another 911 and another Holocaust, all while being protected by a phalanx of London policemen.

Thus we see that today’s multicultural societies tolerate the explicitly intolerant and avowedly unicultural, while refusing to tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance. It’s been that way for 20 years now, ever since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, a British subject, and shortly thereafter large numbers of British Muslims marched through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed. A reader in Bradford wrote to me recalling asking a West Yorkshire policeman on the street that day why the various “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they’d been told to “play it cool.” The calls for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The policeman told him to “Push off” (he expressed the sentiment rather more Anglo-Saxonly, but let that pass) “or I’ll arrest you.” Mr. Rushdie was infuriated when the then Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode. “I well understand the devout Muslims’ reactions, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for,” said His Grace. Rushdie replied tersely, “There is only one person here who is in any danger of dying.”

And that's the way it's gone ever since. For all the talk about rampant “Islamophobia,” it's usually only the other party who is “in any danger of dying.”