Marshall and Shea observe, however, that victory in cases like these can cost a pretty penny, and the costs are likely to dampen anyone’s ardor for self-expression—a point they make in regard to the writer Mark Steyn, who had to fend off complainants in a Canadian court at his own expense, and again in regard to an Australian church minister named Daniel Scot, whose legal expenditures added up, in his own estimation, to hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is always the possibility, too, that even the most decisive of legal victories will leave a door open for extra-legal defeats. Marshall and Shea cite a lawsuit in 2007 against the editor of the French left-wing satirical newspaper Charlie-Hebdo, who was accused of having broken the law by reprinting the Danish cartoons, and was duly acquitted. A few months ago, after Charlie-Hebdo announced a forthcoming issue satirizing the Islamist movement, the newspaper’s offices in Paris were demolished in a fire-bombing.

The legal issues and even some of the violence seem to me, in any case, secondary to a still larger phenomenon, which is a vogue all over the world for an entirely voluntary self-censorship—a custom of downplaying certain topics that are deemed sensitive, or declining even to utter certain controversial words, while pretending to be frank and forthright. By now everyone has noticed the fog of euphemism that has crept over the word “moderate” when applied to Islamist movements and leaders. A “moderate” is someone such as Rachid Ghannouchi, the Islamist leader in Tunisia, basking for the last few months in his October 2011 triumph at the polls—who has spoken at length over the years about “Jewish Masonic Zionist atheistic gangs” and the “Talmudic satanic project” to create a “new Jewish world order on the ruins of the American Western world order,” about the mothers of suicide terrorists as “a new model of woman,” and more generally about “the extinction of Israel” or, more recently and hygienically, “the germ of Israel,” which he has come to think will, like polio, shortly be eradicated. Ghannouchi is one of the leading champions around the world of Hamas—a leading champion because Hamas itself has never been well-endowed with intellectuals, but Ghannouchi is an educated philosopher. Then again, Ghannouchi promises to respect democratic norms within Tunisia itself. Measured by Islamist standards, he is indeed a “moderate.” No one but satanic Masonic Zionist germs need fear extermination, if Rachid Ghannouchi has his way. At least, not for the moment! Yet how can it be that Islamist standards have ended up accepted in the mainstream Western press, such that, for months now, barely a day goes by when we do not read encomia to the “moderation” of Rachid Ghannouchi?

MARSHALL AND SHEA devote very little attention to superstitions about the Jews, and this makes sense from a narrow point of view. A human-rights report should chronicle acts of persecution, and during the last several decades nearly the entire Jewish population of the Muslim world successfully fled to Israel and other places—which means that, unlike the oppressed Ismailis, Ahmadis, Baha’is, Muslim liberals, Christians, and other unhappy minorities, the Jews of the Middle East are right now capable of defending themselves con fuoco, even con troppo fuoco. The only substantial exception can be found in Iran, where a rump population of the ancient Jewish community has stubbornly remained in place. But Marshall and Shea report that Iran’s Jews, having declined to flee, also decline to raise even the tiniest of wan complaints about their circumstances, which may suggest a high degree of intimidation. There are twenty thousand of these people.

Seen from an angle broader than human rights persecution, though, the belief in supernatural Jewish evil might seem worthy of commentary. It is often supposed that, when the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt first acquired a mass popularity, beginning in 1936, its appeal rested on a nationalist loathing for the British. But the campaign that in fact attracted hundreds of thousands of Egyptians into the Brotherhood ranks was anti-Zionist, in solidarity with the Arab Uprising in Palestine—with Zionism defined in the more-than-human manner that could be understood by studying The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, just then taking their prominent place in the Islamist literature. That was ages ago. But does anyone really suppose that supernaturalist anti-Zionism has somehow receded more recently to the margins of the Islamist imagination?