In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right

A few years ago, I appeared on a live Egyptian television show hosted by a conservative Muslim with jihadist sympathies. He lured me on by offering to answer any question I had about Islam, including, he said, “whether the Prophet Muhammad was a child molester.” The host seemed awfully open-minded, I thought, given how humorless jihadists tend to be about the Prophet. When the lights went up and the program began, I mentioned the child-molester issue, and the host remained true to his word, neither bursting into a rage nor chiding me for my impertinence. (I wrote about the experience for the November 2012 issue of this magazine.)

Around the same time, a woman referred to as E.S. was convicted in Austria for, in effect, not phrasing her identical curiosity in the form of a question. On