Death to the downloader

An Afghan court sentenced journalism student Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23, to death for downloading and distributing an article calling Muhammad a "killer and adulterer."

And US college students think they have it rough when caught downloading illegally. By now, what rankles most about these calls for death sentences -- for naughty novels, misnamed teddy-bears, scandalous downloads -- is not just that they happen, but that the weird-beards of radical Islam have made them seem routine. Is every act of violence and religious perversity capable of seeming normal through repetition? How frightening to think that we might be subject to this inuring effect, if the same courts decided to enforce, say, the rules concerning slavery in the Koran. To compensate for this creeping change in the terms of the argument, we defenders of heresy need to escalate our denunciations each time an atrocity like this is likely to happen. Regrettably, the denunciations have instead become quieter and less impassioned instead. — Graeme Wood

Death to the downloader

First they came for our novelists...

Friends like these