Good grief!

From the BBC:

"A story based on the Three Little Pigs has been turned down from a government agency's annual awards because the subject matter could offend Muslims."

Again, from the BBC:

An Afghan journalist has been sentenced to death by a provincial court for distributing "blasphemous" material.

In the Netherlands,

The Dutch government is set to impose a ban on the Muslim burqa in schools and government offices.

But in Finland,

Finnish Swimming Halls Closed to Non-Muslims For Islamic Swimming.......

Finally, an American historian claims that

the West would be better off if it had been incorporated into an all-conquering Islamic empire in the early Middle Ages.

His reviewer comments:

OK.

Still, it's fair to wonder why, if that's true, the West ended up with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Revolution and the Islamic world got chronic underdevelopment, a pervasive religious obscurantism, Al Qaeda and the trust fund states of the Arabian peninsula? It's also fair to point out that both the Muslim philosopher Averroës and the Jewish philosopher-physician Maimonides were sent fleeing for their lives by Islamic fundamentalists and not the Christian Reconquista. Moreover, the Carolingian incursion into Spain -- over which Lewis frets so forcefully -- was undertaken in response to an invitation by Saracen grandees fearful of Abd al-Rahman's expanding hegemony.

Tags: culture Muslim Western Civilization