The Danish cartoon controversy is cited briefly in the background paper as an illustration of divided opinion between those who advocate limiting free expression to respect "religious sensitivities" and those who oppose restriction on the grounds of "a more absolute interpretation of this right". While extremists torched European embassies in Muslim countries, "moderate" European Muslims pleaded for respect for the Prophet in their adopted homelands. Lawsuits, death threats and a whole range of less dramatic pressure have produced lasting effects in Europe.

In its exquisite concern for "visible minorities", the agency ignores the fate of an invisible minority - intellectuals reduced to silence because they dared to criticise Islam. The freedom to say what one thinks about any religion - its clerics, practices, precepts and sartorial rules - is as much a part of the European heritage as giving voice to the oppressed. At the dawn of the 21st century, in a once enlightened Europe, Theo van Gogh was savagely murdered. Authors and politicians need police protection, have been forced into hiding, reduced to silence and deprived of their fundamental rights. For Robert Redeker, a former philosophy teacher at a lycée in Toulouse, the consequences of this thought control have been devastating.

Redeker has been in hiding ever since his op-ed article "Face aux intimidations islamistes, que doit faire le monde libre?" (How should the free world confront Islamist intimidation?), appeared in Le Figaro on 19 September 2006, two days after Pope Benedict XVI's speech at Regensburg. The outrage provoked by the Pope's observation on the relation between Islam and violence, wrote Redeker, was an attempt by this same Islam to stifle freedom of thought and expression, the most precious Western value, which did not exist in any Muslim country. Islam was trying to impose its rules on Europe, he added, citing, among others, prohibition of caricatures, pressure to allow girls to wear the hijab to school and accusations of Islamophobia.

For Redeker, Islam, like communism - another totalitarian belief-system - sold itself as an alternative to Western culture and played on Western sensibilities by claiming to speak for the impoverished masses. Islam, he went on, was contemptuous of "decadent" Western society with its secularised Christianity, open-hearted generosity, sexual freedom and democratic values.