contours of discourse

The boundaries of what is deemed acceptable discussion are fluid and changing.

A few weeks ago I asserted that the American philosopher Doctor David Wood and the Hyde Park orator Miss Hatun Tash were between them, and along with similar like minded commentators on the internet, making Muslim red lines regarding commentary on Islam, utterly irrelevant.

They were I said, effectively revolutionising the formerly artificially repressed context of discussions with Muslims that has prevailed across all our cultures for a thousand years

The artificially repressed context being that Muslims make the rules and Muslims draw up the red lines which must not be transgressed.

By red lines, I mean those issues and considerations which Muslims prevent entering popular discourse through the permanent threat and practice of murder, torture, violence and various other variegated intimations of harm to the person. It is through murder, torture, violence and harm that Muslims prevent anyone from speaking out about the bloodsoaked reality of their history, religion, culture and behaviour.

I suggested essentially that up to now Muslims have prevented widespread frank assessments of the Prophet Muhammed, of the Quran, and of the peaceloving religion of Islam itself, through violence.

David Wood, Hatun Tash and others seemed to me to have shown extraordinary personal courage as well as insight in  defying threats to their personal safety in order to issue their commentaries on Islam.

At the time I wondered how Islam could survive if its implicit threat of violence towards any who comment on it, was taken away.

Up to now cultural silence about the depravities of Islam has prevailed in the declining media groups of the West, in academe and among our pseudo elites.

This acquiescent silence has been bolstered by regular Muslim mass murders in our streets pour encourager les autres, as a little reminder shall we say of what's at stake.

The Muslim murders and totures in Paris in 2015 can seem like a distant memory.

The Muslim bombing of children and adults at a pop concert in Manchester in 2017 can seem similarly far distant.

The Jihdadi truck rammings of crowds of people in the French town of Nice in 2016 killing 86, and in Berlin in the same year killing 12, and in Barcelona Spain in 2017 killing 16, and in New York also in 2017 killing eight people, might for all the consideration they get in public discourse have happened decades ago.

The declining media groups of the West and our political representatives have allowed those things to be forgotten or treated as irrelevant.

Those of us who sought to warn about the Jihad and its roots in the dysfunctions of Islam, are routinely labelled racist.

David Wood and Hatun Tash have changed that, not quite single handedly, but almost.

David Wood and Hatun Tash profess to be Christians but there are similar significant commentators speaking out about the inherent violences of Islam who call themselves atheists. I am thinking of Harris Sultan, Ridevan Eydemir, Sarah Haidar and Abdullah Samir. There are also many Muslims who are concerned about the violence endmic in their culture.

So the discourse isn't static.

Our media groups may be silent or complicit but many ex Muslims and some contemporary Muslims have joined their voices to the warnings about Islam.

Things change.

The fluctuations in discourse are like the shifting of borders on a battlefront.

Free speech, discourse itself, is certainly a battlefront for Jihadists.

But on the internet and in the streets, more people are speaking out as never before about the dysfunctions which they believe are inherent to Islamic culture.

Even in the atrophied politically anodyne leftist West at the rarified upper reaches of our societies, some politicians are becoming less delicate about the matter.

Yes, the boundaries of discourse are shifting.

It has been my opinion for some time that David Wood and Hatun Tash are risking their lives in subjecting Islam and its Prophet to long overdue public scrutiny.

Do the rest of us have a duty to join them?

There is a dilemma.

I do not approve of Muslim attempts to terrorise or kill David Wood or Hatun Tash or anyone else commenting on Islam.

I do not approve of calculated insults to the Prophet Mohammed or the Quran.

I do not approve of Muslim thuggery.

What to do?

Mr Wood after certain provocations directed towards him (involving a Muslim debater calling himself Mohammed Hijab who posted a photo of David Wood's wife on his website) ate a page of the Quran live on air during an internet broadcast. Hatun Tash regularly holds up cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed featuring the very representations of the Prophet that Muslims commit murder to prevent being seen.

This part of David Wood's and Hatun Tash's advocacy does not appeal to me although their courage and defiance of red lines does.

Truly the rules of the game are changing.

We see the empire of Islam attempting to strike back, to get the Jinn back in the bottle as it were.

Flailing wildly you might say to reassert the delineation of discourse by terror.

Samuel Paty a teacher who showed his students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed during a class on Free Speech, was beheaded last week in the streets of Paris by Muslims seeking to reassert the red line notion that no criticism may be made of the Prophet Muhammed.

This attempt to reassert Islamist red lines has indeed altered the contours of discourse but  not in the way its Muslim perpetrators had hoped.

Instead of being cowed, the French have hardened their hearts against the tide of Jihad that has engulfed their formerly appeaserish nation.

I have seen signs of this among the French since the still unexplained torching of the Cathedrale De Notre Dame last year.

Following the beheading of Samuel Paty, French President Emanuel Macron announced grimly: "Fear has changed sides."

This is the frankest threat any political leader in Western Europe has ever made to the Jihadis in our lifetime for they regard fear as their sole preserve and primary weapon.

Turkey's sabre rattling Muslim Brotherhood President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, breaking a number of diplomatic protocols, immediately accused President Macron of having mental problems. He did not trouble himself with any half hearted condemnations of the beheading of Samuel Paty by Erdogan's fellow Muslims.

Mr Erdogan is a busy man. He made his remarks about the French President's sanity while still fresh from his adventures this month instigating a new war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and after sending Turkish warships to threaten Greece no less over mineral rights in the Mediterranean, and while balancing these activities mind you, with his ongoing sponsorship of a side in the civil war in Libya, and while perhaps still recovering from his failed attempts throughout the past decade to project Turkish power into Syria and Iraq via the Muslim Brotherhood franchisees Al Qaeda and Isis, and their recently defunct Caliphate.

With Macron speaking out and the French people awakening from a half century of stupor, and even Ex Muslims joining their voices to those warning about Islam, we could have been forgiven gentle travellers of the internet for hoping that the tide may be turning at last against Jihadism and against any red line limitations imposed by Jihadis on free speech.

But news has come that David Wood has been warned by the FBI that there is a threat to his life.

And this evening in London an unidentified assailant lunged from the crowd at Hyde Park and attacked Hatun Tash.

The Islamists are getting desperate.

Their world is passing away.

Its death throes, if the Jihadis in our streets and the adventurism of Erdogan are anything to go by, will be bloody.

For all of us.