An excellent piece by Caroline Glick, on standing up to Islamist terrorism and intimidation: Of courage and cowardice. (Hat tip: scaramouche.)

Theo van Gogh was a hero in the battle for freedom in this world war, and he was gunned down Tuesday for fighting this terrible fight. His assassin, who found him riding his bicycle through his hometown of Amsterdam, shot him eight times and then slit his throat. He killed him because van Gogh dared to speak the truth.

Vincent van Gogh’s great-grand nephew stuck his neck out. He was a filmmaker who recently produced a documentary showing how Islam oppresses women. One might think that given the totalitarian subjugation of women throughout the Muslim world, such a film would not spark a controversy. But in Europe these days, anything that points out the primitive and barbaric treatment that hundreds of millions of women suffer in the Islamic world, as well as in Islamic enclaves in the West, is considered verboten.

Muslim extremists can gang rape women — Muslim and non-Muslim — and mutilate their daughters’ genitalia as a matter of course. They can indoctrinate their daughters into believing that covering themselves from head to toe with potato sacks and draperies will somehow set them free. They can do all of this — and burn down synagogues — and reasonably assume that the European press won’t mention their ethnic identity or ask what is wrong with them as a group for carrying out barbaric, evil, and primitive acts against others.

So, in stating the obvious, Theo van Gogh was picking a fight with a violent yet protected minority. Suddenly, in our topsy-turvy world, it was van Gogh, not the evil, racist, fascist misogynists about whom he produced a film, who was controversial. And now he is dead.