Those who insult Islam have done nothing wrong; but those insulting Islam to hurt and marginalize Muslims within society are no better than any other bigot.

this sounds like a catch-22. if anti-Muslim criticism is indistinguishable from well intentioned one then it sounds easy to just accuse everyone of being anti-muslim.

Terrorist attacks in response to such expression is already systematically opposed, so what more do you want?

i want criticism of religion to be normalized.

If I thought that via Mohamed cartoons within three years we would have millions more ex-Muslims; then absolutely publish away. But this same shit has been going on for over a decade and I don’t think it’s working.

But it is. 10 years ago you wouldn’t even hear of the concept of atheism or LGBT people, you’d never hear of people criticizing Islam at all and now you see people on TV do it. Now you see scholars scurry to prove Aisha was 18 when she had sex with Mohamed, declaring sexual harassment to be a sin and arguing maybe *don’t * kills the gays and the converts. Normalizing topics works, of course there will be resistance. Sometimes violent but ultimately it works. Dawkins gets a lot of well deserved flack but his edgelord book and common public appearances did reach here, all the way in the Arab world. His book on atheism, got translated unofficially and downloaded over 10 million times from one site.