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This past September, Robert Redeker, a French high-school philosophy teacher... 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." If Jesus was "a master of love," he wrote, Mohammad was "a master of hatred." Of the three "religions of the book,"...

They say that the Lord works in mysterious ways. Last year's remarks by Pope Benedict XVI--when he spoke of the Qur'an's commands to spread Islam by the sword as incompatible with reason--were met with the usual rage from many in the Muslim community and their sympathizers. Though it did not immediately seem so, this might just have signaled a watershed event in the global struggle against those who are most willing to use that sword. Soon after the Pope's remarks, rare yet un-isolated cases of common sense seem to be breaking out all over and resistance, armed and otherwise, to...

A Fatwa on the Truth http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10481 It is one of those uniquely modern Western paradoxes, to wit, that the most courageous Europeans are those forced into hiding. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, the Danish editorial cartoonists -- all are paying the price for freely expressing their opinions and beliefs -- or lack thereof. Add to that exalted list one Robert Redeker. M. Redeker, a high school philosophy professor in suburban Toulouse, is in the bouillabaisse for a commentary he wrote last month for Le Figaro in which he accused Islam of "exalting violence," and christened the Muslim prophet Muhammad a...

Spencer on the Redeker death threats at HotairTwo guys they want deadToday's Jihad Watch videoblog at Hotair deals with the strange contradictions of the death threats against French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker

The reactions triggered by Benedict XVI on Islam and violence are part of the attempt made by Islam to kill the West's most precious value, which is nowhere to be found in the Muslim world : freedom of thought and speech. Islam is trying to impose its rules on Europe : public swimming pools which are restricted to women at certain times, criticism or caricatures of Islam forbidden, strong demands for Muslim pupils to receive Halal meals in school canteens, struggle to impose the Islamic veil in schools, accusations of "Islam phobia" against free minds. How could we explain that...

PARIS, Oct 2, 2006 (AFP) - France's best-known philosophers published an open letter in Le Monde newspaper Monday expressing support for Robert Redeker, the teacher who is in hiding after receiving death threats for an article attacking Islam. The writers -- who include Bernard-Henri Levy, Alain Finkielkraut and Andre Glucksmann -- urged the French state to defray Redeker's expenses while he is under threat "just as the English authorities did not hesitate to do during the Rushdie affair." Redeker, a 52 year-old father of three and philosophy teacher at a lycee near Toulouse, is receiving round-the-clock police protection and changing...