"The Free World Fatwas Itself."

Mark Steyn also goes yard:

Andrew's post from this morning on Geert Wilders has stayed with me all day — especially this line from Edmund Standing:

How is [British Foreign Secretary] Miliband any better than Muslims who screamed about The Satanic Verses without bothering to read it?

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the Ayatollah's fatwa against Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses. Two decades on, who needs the mullahs? These days western nations are happy to fatwa their own. It's now a familiar pattern.

If you threaten violence, the authorities cave in, and do the mob's bidding in the interests of "public order" — as they did in Toronto on Wednesday, when thugs attacked a Jewish center:

The police demanded that the center itself close down — punishing the innocent and achieving the goal of the mob.

If you're a "moderate Muslim" who gets death threats and complains to the authorities,

The police will dispatch two burly Muslim police officers. These gentlemen will warn the complainer to button it, lest he rile up restive Muslims.

If young Muslim girls are being kidnapped and forced into marriage with their first cousins, the British Home Office minister will suggest that these matters are best handled discreetly and informally. If young Muslim girls are being murdered in "honor killings", the Chief Commissar of the Ontario "Human Rights" Commission will explain that they're a "small commission" and they have to be able to prioritize and that Mark Steyn is a far greater threat to the Queen's peace than killers of Muslim women.

But, if you don't threaten violence, if you don't issue death threats, if you don't kill anyone, if you just make a movie or write a book or try to give a speech, the state will prosecute you, ban you or (in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali) force you to flee your own country.

In their appeasement of thugs, buffoons like Miliband and the Tory squishes across the House of Commons on the Opposition benches are making it very clear that the state accords more respect to violence than to debate. As I said to my interrogators in Ontario this week:

When you go down that road, all you do is lead to the situation that you have in, say, Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, you can't start a newspaper and print what you think, so if you object to the House of Saud, the only thing you can do is blow stuff up.

In Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and elsewhere (as the Instaprof has often noted) the state is teaching a very dangerous lesson.

As Mark Steyn notes, Happy Fatwa 20th Anniversary. Marvel at how much worse things have gotten since.