So This is What Islam Means by Tolerance
Peter Hitchens
Mail on Sunday, 5 February 2006

Stupid attacks on religion make me angry.  I specially loathe the pubescent sneers of the film Life Of Brian, which an entire generation seems to think is the last word on Christianity.  I feel faintly ill whenever I hear John Lennon's smug, brainless atheist hymn Imagine.

So a large part of me sympathises with Muslims who object to cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.  Every educated person knows such drawings upset the Islamic faithful.  But, even so, I feel I have to defend the cartoons because of the nature of the protests against them.

Just look at the disgusting, openly murderous placards carried by Islamist demonstrators from London to Jakarta.  The inflamed mobs, the boycotts, the flag-burners are not protesting against an assault on faith itself, or demanding that God is not mocked.  They are insisting on a special status for their religion - a status it almost achieved in this country last week.

For Islam, which claims to be so wounded by this episode, is not tender-hearted about those who choose other paths to God.  The myth about Muslim 'tolerance' needs to be exploded.  When it has been in unchallenged power, Islam has treated members of rival faiths as third-class citizens, forced to pay heavy taxes, made to dress in distinctive and often humiliating ways, and stripped of legal protection.

Its preachers - especially in countries where there are Christians - ceaselessly deny the central claims of Christianity.  The Koran specifically urges Muslims not to be friends with Christians or Jews.  And the Hadith - Islam's second book of scripture - contains fierce hostility to Jews.

You might say the same about parts of the Bible, but it is a very long time since any serious Christian figure has preached against Judaism - or Islam for that matter.  Yet I have seen contemporary videos of Muslim clerics fulminating against Jews, and newspapers in Muslim countries often contain Judophobe libels of a kind that would horrify public opinion here.

What is more, the increasingly isolated Arab Christians have been quietly leaving the Middle East in their thousands during recent years, largely because of subtle persecution by a newly confident Islam, which it is dangerous - and even fatal - to resist.

Those who demand tolerance from others are obliged to show tolerance themselves.  As long as they do not, then they should not be surprised if they are viewed with suspicion and subjected to criticism.  Muslims are entitled to be treated with good manners.  But they should not be allowed to dictate what is and is not published about them.