Bruce Bawer

The New York debate set its sights on Islam itself – quite reasonably, since, in the wake of 9/11 and several other major terrorist acts, cartoon riots in Denmark, assassinations in the Netherlands, and so on, all of them perpetrated by Muslims who made it clear that they were motivated by their faith, it is indeed Islam that we should be talking about.  The Oslo debate, by contrast, shifted the focus to non-Muslims who speak out critically about Islam, placing them, as it were, on trial, just as Geert Wilders is now on trial in the Netherlands, in an effort to decide whether their criticism of Islam should be judged to cross a line, and whether they, therefore, deserve to be branded with the scarlet letter “I” – for Islamophobe. http://www.rights.no/publisher/publisher.asp?id=59&tekstid=4233