In her new book In Praise of Blasphemy: Why Charlie Hebdo is not Islamophobic, Caroline Fourest wanted to show how much ground we have conceded. Instead, the treatment of her work by the publishing industry shows how much has been lost. No Anglo-Saxon publisher would touch it, and only fear can explain the rejection letters. The author is not an unknown.  Fourest is an established writer and one of the few French intellectuals prepared to think for herself rather than parrot a party line. She worked at Charlie Hebdo, so she can provide a first-hand account of its struggles and thinking. An English translator has done her proud. Her book has an endorsement from Salman Rushdie on its cover, which any publisher would kill for: “Now more than ever this is a vitally important book.”

So it is, and readable too. To top it all, Fourest was offering the English translation to publishers as IS was preparing to attack Paris. Its topicality was beyond doubt. Publishers normally want topical books, but their refusal to publish Fourest shows that you can be too topical, particularly if your topicality incites a paranoid fear in a publisher’s mind that men in balaclavas might burst into his offices. All the cries of “Je suis Charlie” have turned out to be so many lies, as they were always going to be. The murder of Charlie Hebdo’s journalists reinforced the silent determination of every editor and publisher in the West that Charlie was the last thing they were going to be.

In Praise of Blasphemy is now available as an ebook on Amazon. This is an important book because it goes to the heart of a distinction between anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamophobia that hypocrites who pose as anti-racists and religious sectarians who want to protect their oppressive theology from criticism have deliberately blurred.

Anti-Muslim bigotry must be fought, as must the denial on the Right that anti-Muslim bigotry even exists. If contemporary culture just asked us to fight it, I would not have a difficulty. Instead, it asks us to bite our tongues and mute our criticism of religious belief or risk being accused of Islamophobia.

After Islamists murdered the staff of Charlie Hebdo, elements of the British and American intelligentsia sank lower than even the severest critics imagined possible as they failed to insist on the distinction. They talked as if the cartoonists were the real criminals and the Islamists their victims. I remember sitting at King’s College London and listening as an academic — not some spotty student with hormones for brains, but a tenured professor with pretensions to intellectual integrity — explained that a Hebdo cartoon of Boko Haram’s captured sex slaves demanding benefits was racist. I pointed out that it was perfectly obvious to anyone who could read French that Hebdo was satirising French conservatives so lost in racist fears they imagined enslaved Nigerian women were threatening to come to France and steal their taxes. He would not retract. Because Hebdo criticised religious extremism it had to be racist. No other explanation was acceptable to him or to most of the multicultural Left.