There was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, calls for the head (literally) of a Danish cartoonist who dared to depict the Prophet Mohammed in a drawing and, more recently, the threat of 40 lashes for a 54-year-old teacher from Liverpool after one of her pupils in the Sudan innocently named the class teddy bear 'Mohammed'.
Western liberals have tended to respond in one of two ways. One is to suppose that there was some genuine grievance being suffered by the Islamists. Remove this and the mobs would fade away.

This school of thought usually had no difficulty in identifying the underlying 'causes' as U.S. foreign policy and the existence of the state of Israel.

Other liberals take the view that it is pointless to apply the principles of 17th-century philosopher John Locke and sweet reason to people who stir up mobs and murder on such manifestly trumped-up charges.

They point instead to the deplorable ideas being peddled by the Islamists - hatred of homosexuals, subjugation of women, violent anti-Judaism.

And they ask by what right the Islamists attempt to impose their perverted values upon the West while milking Western democracies for benefits of all kinds.

It is one thing to suppose the West represents the Great Satan, another to choose to reside within the Great Satan's jurisdiction, deriving free schooling and higher education, free or subsidised housing and employment while denouncing the countries that supply these benefits.