Sylvain Gougenheim, history professor at the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, was denounced for claiming, in Aristote à Mont St Michel, that Islam does not deserve exclusive credit for the transmission of classical philosophy. "Arab" translators of Aristotle, she wrote, were often Christian dhimmi scholars in lands conquered by Islam, and copyists at Mont St Michel conserved texts brought through non-Muslim circuits.

The philosopher André Glucksmann provoked furious, snide anti-Jewish comments from Le Monde subscribers after publication of a thoughtful essay on the principle of "disproportion" in the current Gaza operation. Arrests of sleeper cells in France and other European countries have yielded hit lists of intellectuals, including the popular philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy.

This challenge to freedom of expression is not mentioned in FRA documents, which focus on racism, discrimination, socio-economic problems, the underprivileged, migrants and immigrants. Coupling anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, classifying anti-Semitism statistics with extreme right-wing crime, the FRA makes much ado about Muslim schoolgirls fighting for the right to wear the hijab, niqab and burqa to school and never mentions Jewish children forced to abandon state schools in Europe because the administration cannot protect them against harassment and physical attacks.

Speakers and delegates at the FRA conference repeatedly denounced a post-9/11 climate of fear induced, they claimed, not by any real danger but motivated by a determination on the part of Western governments to "control populations". The irony is that the city of Paris has declared the Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen an honorary citizen and is putting her up in the Couvent des Récollets, an international centre for scholars and artists housed in a refurbished convent.

Ms Nasreen has been on the run ever since she published a novel describing the persecution of a Hindu girl by Muslims in Bangladesh, followed by other works denouncing the persecution of women under sharia. A brief article in the French news weekly Le Point reduced it to a blanket "Nasreen denounces the persecution of women by religions."