Quotes from Nick Cohen

they worry about Western racists, who use Muhammad's marriage to Aisha to taunt ethnic minorities. But it is as important to worry about religious extremists who use the arguments for male supremacy, homophobia and the exploitation of women and children in holy books to justify oppression – and to notice that there is not a great deal of difference between the ideologies of the religious and the racial extremists.

In Iran after the 1979 revolution, the Islamists reduced the minimum age of marriage for girls to nine. In 2000, under pressure from women's rights activists, the Iranian parliament voted to raise it to fifteen. However, the Council of Guardians, an anti-democratic oversight body dominated by traditional clerics, vetoed the reform, saying that the new ruling was contrary to Islamic law.

The cops, however, took his satire on the chin and went on to guard him from assassins.

here is the second large point, to go through The Satanic Verses with the squinting eye of a censor searching for thought crimes, or even to seek to see it in the round, as I have tried to do, is to blind yourself to the real reason why the fatwa against Salman Rushdie became the Dreyfus Affair of our age.

From the communists he took the notion of the vanguard party, which would tell the masses what they wanted, regardless of whether the masses wanted it or not, and vague notions of a just future where all would be equal. From the Nazis, Jamaat, and its partners in the Arab Muslim Brotherhood, took the Jewish conspiracy theory.

When the Bengalis of East Pakistan revolted against a system that made them second-class citizens, the Pakistani army's retaliation stunned a twentieth century that thought it had become inured to genocide.

The next countries to ban The Satanic Verses were Sudan, Bangladesh and apartheid South Africa. If you find the alliance of militant Islamists and white supremacists strange, then you have yet to learn that all the enemies of liberalism are the same.

Intellectuals who had made it to the West were beyond the reach of oppressive forces. They had a place of sanctuary. The fatwa changed all that. It redrew the boundaries of the free world, shrinking its borders and erasing zones of disputation from the map of the liberal mind.

American Supreme Court intervened, and its decision in the 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is one of those rare moments in history when freedom of speech made an unequivocal advance.

had become the chosen instrument for state officials and police chiefs seeking to punish citizens protesting about their abuses of power.

In the United States, Islamists threatened bookstores and firebombers hit the offices of the Riverdale Press, a weekly paper in the Bronx, after it published an unexceptional editorial saying that the public had the right to read whatever novels it pleased.

As in America and Europe, British bookshops withdrew the novel in the face of threats – two independent bookshops on the Charing Cross Road were bombed, as were Penguin bookshops and a department store.

Iranian or Pakistani writers who saw the violence in the West realised that if clerics issued fatwas against them in Tehran or Lahore, they could no longer expect to flee to a safe haven.

They did not say that it was Afrikaanophobic to be judgemental about religion, or explain that it was imperialist to criticise the beliefs of 'the other'. If a religion was oppressive or a culture repugnant, one had a duty to offend it.

hope I am not making the insulting error of pretending that democracies are as oppressive as dictatorships – such comparisons are the self-pitying and self-dramatising whines of spoilt Western children.

There also needs to be a clean break with totalitarianism: both totalitarian regimes abroad and the totalitarian left – if it is still a left – at home. It is incredible that this point needs to be reiterated after the twentieth century; astonishing that we need to go through all that again.

Would they defend free speech in murderous times? Or would they hold their tongues and accept that they must 'respect' views they knew to be false?

Notice how broadly Mill set his harm principle. It is not enough to say that people who hate the idea of homosexuality suffer mental distress at the knowledge that it is legal. They must suffer actual harm, and as they do not, they cannot prohibit it.

there always have been and always will be men who wish to dominate women, the peculiar iniquity of religion is to turn misogyny into a part of the divine order: to make sexism a virtue and equality a sin.

Writers write badly when they have something to hide.

The law should restrict itself to punishing speech that directly provokes crime – incitement to murder, incitement to violence or incitement to arson. It should not punish incitement to hatred, because it is not a crime to hate people, any more than it is to envy them or to lust after them.

Writers write badly when they have something to hide. Clarity makes their shaky assumptions plain to the readers – and to themselves.

Senators, MPs, diplomats and journalists belatedly realized that they needed to know about the new menace. They had looked the other way because they worried the demented Ayatollah Khomeini would invade Iraq and be in a position to move into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and control most of the world's oil. Now the demented Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and could move into Saudi Arabia and control most of the world's oil.

Any writer tackling religious oppression has to accept that liberalism tempered the misogyny of mainstream Christianity and Judaism in the rich world after centuries of struggle, but left the poor world largely untouched. Christianity and Judaism are not 'better' than Islam and Hinduism. Free-thinkers have just made a better job of containing their prejudices and cruelties.