Anyone who suggests that there is a war being waged by Muslims in their own lands and in the lands in which they have settled—these last, by the way, are the really aggressive “settlers”!—against rationalists and true liberals, traditional conservatives and Islamic dissenters, Christians and Jews is likely to be labeled an “Islamophobe.” I have been, and thousands of you out there, perhaps millions, have been so labeled...or almost. And, at dinner with friends, have anyone of you just raised questions about the tyranny of silence which the “politically so correct” are trying to impose on those who are fearful of the admixture of faith and bombs and then not found yourselves attacked as at least “intolerant” and perhaps even a bigot? Or, yes, even an Islamophobe.

Pascal Bruckner was one of those, then young, nouveaux philosophes, who sprung on the scene in the early seventies and delivered lethal intellectual blows to the radical conformism of much of French thought. As a by-product of this struggle of the minds Jean-Paul Sartre was also unseated as the reigning demi-god of the French mind (and displaced in some way by Raymond Aron, his contemporary and long-time antagonist.) The new philosophers are still writing and speaking against the vulgarities of Sartre’s successors, the most vulgar of whom is Slavoj Zizek but taken on by both Bruckner and my friend Bernard-Henri Levy.

A surgical dissection of Islamophobia, its origins and uses, has been needed for some time. Bruckner, the consummate French essayist, has now done a short and withering one, published in English in after a translation from Liberation.

The entire essay is very much worth reading. But here are three paragraphs of its essence:

At the end of the 1970s, Iranian fundamentalists invented the term "Islamophobia" formed in analogy to "xenophobia". The aim of this word was to declare Islam inviolate. Whoever crosses this border is deemed a racist. This term, which is worthy of totalitarian propaganda, is deliberately unspecific about whether it refers to a religion, a belief system or its faithful adherents around the world.