On his academic rhetoric blog, Prof. Jim Aune (nb: not a rightist) asks "how long till this happens here in the US?":
This past September, Robert Redeker, a French high-school philosophy teacher at Saint-Orens-de-Gameville (a small city near Toulouse) and the author of several scholarly books, published an op-ed article in the newspaper Le Figaro. The piece, a response to the controversy over remarks about Islam made a week earlier by Pope Benedict XVI, was titled "What Should the Free World Do in the Face of Islamist Intimidation?" It was a fierce critique of what Redeker called Islam’s attempt "to place its leaden cloak over the world."
In a series of events that will surprise absolutely nobody, Redeker and his family were driven from their home by violent Islamist death threats, forced to move from town to town in absolute secrecy. Violent advocates of political Islam responded to being accused of violent tendencies by... threatening mass violence. As to the rest of France's reaction:
the vast majority of responses, even when couched as defenses of the right to free speech, were in fact hostile to the philosophy teacher. The Communist mayor of Saint-Orens-de-Gameville, echoed by the head of Redeker’s school, deplored the fact that he had included his affiliation at the end of the article. France’s two largest teachers’ unions, both of them socialist, stressed that “they did not share Redeker’s convictions.” The leading leftist human-rights organizations went much farther, denouncing his “irresponsible declarations” and “putrid ideas.” A fellow high-school philosophy teacher, Pierre Tévanian, declared (on a Muslim website) that Redeker was “a racist” who should be severely punished by his school’s administration. Even Gilles de Robien, the French minister of education, criticized Redeker for acting “as if he represented the French educational system”—a bizarre charge against the author of a piece clearly marked as personal opinion.
Among members of the media, Redeker was scolded for articulating his ideas so incautiously. On the radio channel Europe 1, Jean-Pierre Elkabach invited the beleaguered teacher to express his “regret.” The editorial board of Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, characterized Redeker’s piece as “excessive, misleading, and insulting.” It went so far as to call his remarks about Muhammad “a blasphemy,” implying that the founder of Islam must be treated even by non-Muslims in a non-Muslim country as an object not of investigation but of veneration.
Were it not for the fact that Iran is going to take the honor first, France would be well on its way to becoming the first Muslim theocracy with the bomb.
Previously: France - How Did It Come To This?, AP Identifies Root of Muslim Violence in France: Non-Muslims!, Hey France, Shove It
