Quotes from Nick Cohen

I think it has become more prevalent because the space has been left completely uncontested to the Muslim right wing, which does not respect anyone's rights whatsoever except for this one right to cover a woman's face,' she replied. 'No one has pushed back against the Muslim right wing. Integration has largely failed across Europe, even in the UK.

reactionary

here is something strange. Between the fatwa and the present, religious killers have murdered just one Western artist – the Dutch director Theo van Gogh, assassinated in 2004 for making a film with the Somali feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yet in the same period Western culture changed, and not for the better.

Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism.

free-floating, gutless state of frantic evasiveness that preferred to twist and temporize rather than take a stand which required commitment to defend.

Compared to the millions killed in wars and genocides in the years that followed the fatwa, the pain the enemies of the novel inflicted was small. But it was sufficient. The threats against Rushdie produced a fear that suffused Western culture and paralysed its best instincts.

After Rushdie, the fear of a knife in the ribs or a bomb at the office meant that liberals who stuck by liberalism were in the wrong. They knew the consequences now. If someone killed them, they were guilty of provoking their own murder. In the eyes of most politicians and most of the journalists, broadcasters, academics and intellectuals whose livelihoods depended on the freedom to debate and criticise, the targets of religious violence had no one to blame but themselves.

As in Western Europe, apparently liberal laws the authorities say are aimed against the hate crimes of extremists suffocate wider debates.

The politically committed are like football fans. They support their side come what may and refuse to see any good in the opposing team.

Kremlin, the regime has passed laws that ban 'propaganda for homosexuality', and imposed a criminal liability for libel.

rootless affliction.

When Milton said that he could not praise a 'fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary'

authority is no guarantee of truth, if authority is not tested.

Today's supporters of religious censorship claim that they are different. They say they are not advocating censorship because they believe we must bow down before Church and state, but because we must respect different cultures and say nothing that might offend them.

In the democracies, the fear spread by religious violence is closer to the fear of excessive punishments for inconsequential slights that modern dictatorships generate.

Legitimate criticism of terrorist murder and the oppression of women was turned into something it was not, in this instance a prejudiced hatred of all Muslims. The threat of violent punishment hung in the air. Critics learned that the safe course was to say nothing, because they did not know where fanatics would draw their lines.

The cases they brought could consume their critics' lives, and threaten on occasion to bankrupt them, but they did not consume the lives of the oligarchs. They could hand the job of imposing retribution to their lawyers and reputation managers, and cover the costs of litigation from their loose change.

Jargon-mongers certainly stuffed the business schools and used convoluted language to make banalities appear profound. However, no academics could come close to matching the obfuscation and murkiness of post-modern specialists in 'theory' – feminist theory, postcolonial theory, 'other' theory, critical race theory, queer theory, communicative action theory, structuration theory, neo-Marxian theory … any kind of theory, every kind of theory.

If people assume that everyone on the Left is good, if they can't tear their eyes from abuses close to home to see the darker world beyond, if they pretend that they are not taking sides when they opt for neutrality and then compound the fault by believing that the irrational has rational causes, then disgrace inevitably follows.

the Messenger of God consummated his marriage with me in my house when I was nine years old'.

When all the exceptions have been made, however, Islamic states and paramilitaries are in a league of their own when it comes to religious censorship.

peaceful civil disobedience can work in oppressive societies that nevertheless allow protesters to protest.

It never occurred to Brown that a genocide comparable to Rwanda had taken place in Darfur in western Sudan in 2003, and the wired world had done nothing to stop it.

a God of ten-year-old boys, a God of playground bullies, a God of rapists, of gangs, of pimps. They worship – despite rhetoric about justice and compassion – a God who sides with the strong against the weak, a God who cheers for privilege and punishes egalitarianism. They worship a God who is a male and who gangs up with other males against women. They worship a thug.