"Western governments who do not want to have their embassies burned down, or their trade with Islamic countries boycotted and ruined, or the lives of their nationals in Muslim countries placed in jeopardy, had better make themselves enforcers for the rules of a religion which their citizens do not accept. That is the demand.

They must curb free speech and free expression. Curb the freedom to criticism and mock and outspokenly denounce religion - the freedom from which over centuries most of our freedoms have been spun and consolidated."

True, but not all religions. The media's two-faced approach makes their lie of "sensitivity" stunningly obvious. Meanwhile, see Olivier's article for more evidence... apparently, the EU is looking at a "voluntary" code of press conduct. Meanwhile, Oregon University offers a classic illustration cited in "Our Darkening Sky: Postcards from the Edge," installing the Shari'a promoting and Wahabbist Muslim Students Association as censors of anything written in the school paper about Islam.

But Worker's Liberty goes on to make its most telling point - and this where the religious right's "yes, but..." corps especially needs to listen up:

"The issue is free speech, but it is not just that. It is not just a matter of finding and adhering to general and universal principles. The right to criticise and mock and denounce religion is not just one right among many similar rights. The freedom to criticise religion is, in history, the root out of which all other such freedoms have developed.

It was a long, slow development from the assertion by heretics and protestants - by Albigenses, Hussites, Wycliffites, Lutherans, Calvinists - of their right to disagree with the Catholic church and with each other, to our erstwhile right to freely express atheistic contempt and condemnation of religion — all religion.

It was not a matter of reaching an amicable agreement with the religious in the time of their strength and predominance. It was a matter of drawing a line between them and us and standing on it, of fighting them tenaciously to win the right to dissent and mock and criticise their entrenched bigotry.

Marx wrote truly in 1844, of a German society where religion had only recently been dominant and all-pervasive:

“The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism”. In history that is what it was.

It took us centuries of battles between dissenters and established religion, and the stages with which it was symbiotically entwined, to win the rights that the short-memoried invertebrate liberals now cravenly surrender!

The secular and social rights we have, the freedom from power-inflated superstitions armed to the teeth with the coercive power of a state, the right to think for ourselves and express our thoughts — all these we owe to the heretics who risked and often lost their lives in the struggle to let non-clerics read what they thought was the word of God, the Bible, and construe it for themselves in their own way.

The translator of the Bible whose work was the main basis of the King James version, William Tyndale, was in the early 16th century part of a free-thinking religious underground: he was kidnapped by Papal agents and burned at the stake. In 1880s Britain Charles Bradlaugh had to win four elections in succession before he gained the right for elected atheists to sit in the House of Commons as MPs without first hypocritically taking a religious oath. There were many many battles in between Tundale and Bradlaugh - and afterwards too. All that is being betrayed and prostituted by those who meekly accept the diktats of medievalist-minded political Islam. So are all those who now fight an equivalent battle for the same rights in Muslim countries."

“The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism”. Damn straight. We forget it at our peril.