The development of an effective intellectual response to the ideological challenge posed by Islamic extremism remains elusive, and one of the reasons is the bogeyman of “Islamophobia,” a bogeyman that the enforcers of multiculturalism have used to chilling effect.

Here’s a translation (a little hard to read but, I hope, accurate – I couldn’t find the original subscription-free) of an interesting piece from Le Figaro. It’s not necessary to agree with it all (many readers will not like the author’s very French brand of secularism) to think that it has some useful insights on this phenomenon:

“Islam is untouchable: to criticize or be suspicious of it is a proof of racism. Such is the new vulgate which MRAP [an anti-racist movement], certain sections of the media, academics and political leaders are trying to have accepted. What is this all about in reality? Removing the religion of the Koran from the test to which the two other existing monotheisms have long been subject: the test of self-examination…

The piece is a review of a book, about which the writer has this to say:

“[This] book amounts to what we must call a contemptible police operation worthy of the Stalinist era: by treating democrats as villainous Poujadists [right-wing chauvinists], opportunists, careerists, crude secularizers, persecuted figures from operetta, it turns them into quasi-apostates, traitors to their religion, even harkis [Muslims who worked with the French during the Algerian war], collaborators, enemies of Islam (even if these words are never employed).

“They are guilty then, the Arab women who want to rid themselves of the veil, guilty all those children of immigrants who demand the right to religious indifference, the right to believe in nothing and who do not automatically feel Muslim because they come from Moroccan, Algerian or Tunisian backgrounds? The invention of Islamophobia fulfills several functions: to deny, in order to give it more legitimacy, the reality of an Islamist offensive in Europe, to intimidate and silence bad Muslims, those who impiously seek change and, finally, to block any hope of a religious transformation in the lands of Islam.”

And it concludes as follows:

“Islam is part of the French landscape; it has a right to public recognition and respect; on condition that it respects republican rules and does not demand separate rights, special dispensations for women, various privileges and favors. The best thing we can wish for it is not “phobia” or “philia” but benevolent indifference in a market of spirituality open to all beliefs. If it no longer wants to suffer suspicion, it should engage in a reform as radical as that performed by Catholics or Protestants in the course of the past century. Until then it will remain, moderate Muslims included, the object of justified caution. There’s something stupefying in seeing an “anti-racist organization” criminalizing the adversaries of fanaticism and superstition. If Voltaire were alive today, we can bet that certain “anti-racists” would have him thrown in prison.”

Quite what the author means by “justified caution,” I don’t know. There’s nothing to fear from an Islam that is genuinely ‘moderate,’ but there’s plenty in this piece that applies to the US as much as France.