Quote Originally Posted by Ash View Post
To me this problem started with the support of the politicial and media classes for the muslim side in the Bosnian war. I was never aware of any sense of furious muslim grievance before then, but the hysterical calls for intervention on their behalf, fuelled by unverified propaganda stories circulated by PR companies, and in some cases completely fabricated by journalists, created the muslim-as-victim icon which has been with us ever since. Centre-stage in all this was The Guardian newspaper.
Nah, sorry. Salman Rushdie was the canary in this particular coalmine. We watched a community in this country call for a man to be killed for blasphemy and threatened to the point that the state had to protect him full-time and it didn't wake us up to the fact that something had gone very, very wrong in our muslim population. That was in 1989. We pussyfooted around them then and they saw we were weak.