If there is one question that most concerns the public around the question of radical Islam it is “What is the connection between the extremists and the moderates?” Leading politicians across the Western world have not been much help in answering this question, insisting as they do, that radical Islam has nothing to do with Islam and that the extremists are as far away from the moderates as it is possible to be. Yet the public senses that this is not the case.

Despite the amazing lack of public debate about the actual contours of the discussion, the public knows that something is not right about the analysis provided by Liberal politicians and others. Indeed, the public notices not only that there is some connection between the two (something Democrats in the U.S., among others, deny) but that the connection may be closer than anyone would like. A fine example of this was thrown up in the UK this week in the space of just 24 hours.

On Friday the London Evening Standard carried a story about the police launching a possible “hate crime” investigation into literature that the paper had discovered being handed out at a London mosque. The potential “hate crime” was not even the best known variety — a mean Tweet or a nasty comment — but the sort of thing we used to call “incitement.” The literature being handed out at a mosque in Walthamstow consisted of a booklet which insisted that “any Muslim should kill” anyone who insults the Prophet of Islam. Those who insult the main man “must be killed,” it repeated.

The pamphlet backed up this point of view with reference to classical Islamic law and explained that in the case of those who “insult” Mohammed, such as apostates who “deserve to be assassinated,” it was not necessary to wait for any court or court judgement to rule. Better just to get on with it on your own, was the gist.

In a case that is becoming increasingly familiar to indigenous British people as much as it is to British Pakistanis, the booklet referred to the seminal case of Mumtaz Qadri, the Pakistani man who in 2011 murdered Salman Taseer, the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province. Qadri murdered Taseer because of the latter’s support for the reform of Pakistan’s strict Islamic blasphemy laws. The booklet explains that “all Muslims should support” the assassin Qadri and that even being what the publication calls “a big shot” like Taseer should not protect someone from being killed by any Muslim who feels like it.

Salman Taseer, pictured in the memorial poster at left, was the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province when he was murdered in 2011 by a radical Islamist, because of Taseer’s support for the reform of Pakistan’s strict Islamic blasphemy laws. Right: London police may be launching a “hate crime” investigation into a booklet being handed out at a London mosque, which explains that “all Muslims should support” Taseer’s murderer.

The police are currently investigating the Dar-ul-Uloom Qadria Jilania mosque in Walthamstow, where the booklet was handed out, and would do well to look into the imam of the mosque, Syed Abdul Qadir Jilani, whose name and photograph are on the front of the booklet in question. Of course, the response of the political class in Britain is to ignore any and all such things. “Bad egg” or “one rotten apple” is probably the most the public will be able to expect from any politician, if one were forced to give any view at all on Mr Jilani, his pamphlet or his mosque. Yet the public reads stories like this and rightly wonders where people like Mr Jilani get their ideas from and how widely such ideas might be spread.

The following day (Saturday) readers of The Sun were able to learn of a British celebrity gymnast, Louis Smith, who had got drunk with friends at a wedding and made a video that appeared to have come back to haunt him. As the Sun headline read, “Has he got a screw Louis? Olympic ace Louis Smith accused of mocking Islam after yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’ and pretending to pray in boozy video.” The video of drunken japery included Smith and a friend pulling a rug off a wall and shouting “Allahu Akbar” while the friend pretended to pray in a vaguely Islamic style. As the paper led the story,

“Olympics star and former Strictly Come Dancing winner Louis Smith has been accused of mocking Islam after appearing in a video with a mate drunkenly pretending to pray. The footage shows him with fellow gymnast Luke Carson yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’, an Islamic phrase meaning ‘God is the greatest’.”

It is hardly the most important news story of the year, and hardly involves any of the most important figures of our time. But the story will have been read by millions of readers and they will have noticed the reactions. First, that from a “security source” who tells the paper “Mocking religion is pretty foolish. In the case of Islam, it can also be quite a risky thing to do.” And then the paper has the obligatory quote from an alleged “moderate Muslim,” on this occasion one Mohammed Shafiq of a one-man organization called the “Ramadan Foundation.” Mr Shafiq has previously been hailed in Britain for his apparently exceptional moral courage and bravery in coming out against the mass gang-rape of children. In 2013, he stood accused of attempting to get up a lynch-mob when the reformist Muslim Maajid Nawaz tweeted out an innocuous image that Shafiq insisted was offensive to all the world’s Muslims.

Anyhow — responding to the Louis Smith drunken video, the same Mohammed Shafiq was quoted in the Sun saying of Smith: “I think he should apologise immediately. Our faith is not to be mocked, our faith is to be celebrated and I think people will be offended.” Shafiq does not explain why his faith should not be mocked. Nor does he seem to know anything about the right of free people in free countries to do or say whatever we like about Islam or any other faith whenever we feel like it. There is nothing special about Islam that means it cannot be mocked. In fact, it would be a very good thing (both for Muslims and everyone else) if it were mocked rather more. But there in that sentence is the implicit threat again. Less blatant than the threat against Maajid Nawaz, but very close indeed to the line used by the Walthamstow imam and the extremists who defend Mumtaz Qadri.

All insist that their faith “should not be mocked.” And for those who say they are moderates, and are presented as such by the press, it seems to be exceptionally useful that they do not have to be much more explicit than this. Fortunately for them, there are other people willing to do the killing in countries such as Pakistan and occasionally in the West. The rest of us — whether gymnasts on a night out or anyone else — are simply expected to have learnt this by now. But in this not-so-subtle intimidation do we not see precisely that thing which most worries the public? That despite what our politicians say, the allegedly vast chasm that separates the extremists from the “moderates” seems at times to be almost paper-thin.

Douglas Murray, British author, commentator and public affairs analyst, is based in London, England.

It would be a fair assessment to conclude that many people consider some statements not what they would like to hear — whether by Salman Rushdie, Geert Wilders, Ingrid Carlqvist, Douglas Murray, Lars Hedegaard, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, Theo van Gogh, the Mohammad cartoonists, Stéphane Charbonnier and other editors at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, among others. To say their remarks are sometimes regarded as controversial would be an understatement. Often, they are vociferous and vocal critics of extremist Islam, immigration, censorship and other policies — and they have been accused of Islamophobia, hate speech, and inflaming racial and religious tensions. Several have been threatened with jail and death. Some have been murdered for their warnings.

Importantly, though, none of them has ever directly incited violence against a religion, ethnic minority, or sexual orientation.

Do not these voices, however repellent to some, deserve the chance to be heard without threat of retaliation? Their opinions are often not of the mainstream, but should that lead to censorship, death, or for Wilders and Sabaditsch-Wolff, court trials, for expressing their views?

On May 31, the European Commission announced its decision to control s-called “hate speech.”

As democratic societies, we presumably believe that what strengthens our democracies, and separates free societies from the many authoritarian regimes, is free speech: the ability to air thoughts freely without fear of punishment. There is a saying that the founder of civilization was the first person who threw a word instead of a stone.

Throughout history, it is the minorities or the lone voices that need from the majority to allow everyone to question, comment on and criticize opinions with which they disagree. Freedom to be wrong, heretical or “blasphemous” — as we have seen with Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Darwin or Alan Turing — is the only way that civilisation can grow.

All of us are free not to listen to people with whom we disagree. We are also free to expose their arguments as false. Currently, those who defend free expression are not discussing ideas; they are discussing whether or not one should have a right to speak. Censorship moves debate away from the issues, then the issues remain undiscussed.

The irony is that these censors and would-be censors, such as the European Commission, the Dutch and Austrian courts, Facebook and Twitter are using their freedom of expression to suggest that someone else be robbed of his freedom of expression.

If there is no discussion of ideas, we must ask which ideas are acceptable and which are not, and with such questions, we move into the territory of Orwellian thought crime, which is where the proponents of censorship apparently want us to be. George Orwell’s 1984 was not a manual; it was a stark warning about authoritarianism and censorship.

Is it possible that the censors may wish not to discuss ideas because they fear the answers?

When we present uncomfortable truths, or even untruths, they need to be heard, such as those who argued the world was flat or that vaccinations caused smallpox. It was only freedom of expression that enabled the abolition of slavery, or that supported the theory of evolution, voting rights for women, the Civil Rights Act, or equal opportunity for marriage for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) individuals.

Freedom of expression is the tool that allows those who challenge injustice, prejudice and extremism the chance at least to present their case.

If we never listened to what we find uncomfortable, we would remain stagnant, probably with unbending ideas.

As unpleasant as it may be to listen to opinions that might differ from ours, the alternative, to suffocate free speech, is worse — and incalculably more corrosive to civilization. If the violence carried out in the name of Islam poses a serious threat to the security of the Western World, or if new arrivals in a country are heavily involved in criminal activity, such as trafficking in drugs or humans and are filling the prisons disproportionately to the rest of society, those seem problems that it should be the duty of any citizen to point out. One might wish that these were not true, but the first step in correcting any problem is to be able to state it.

Censorship, by suppressing discussion of problems, therefore fails, counter-productively, to tackle what is causing them. Stifling discussion will not make the problem go away. Meanwhile, it festers and grows worse.

One cannot have discourse if there is no opportunity for opposition. We are now seeing European courts, the European Commission, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the UN Human Rights Council seek to silence those whose views they oppose.

It even turned out, at least in Germany last September, that “hate speech” apparently included posts criticizing mass migration. It would seem, therefore, that just about anything anyone finds inconvenient can be labelled as “racist” or “hate speech.”

Censoring, ironically, ultimately gives the public an extremely legitimate grievance, and could even set up the beginning of a justifiable rebellion.

There is currently a worrying trend. Facebook, evidently attempting to manipulate what news people receive, recently censored the Swedish commentator Ingrid Carlqvist by deleting her account, then censored Douglas Murray’s eloquent article about Facebook’s censorship of Carlqvist. Recently, the BBC stripped the name Ali from Munich’s mass-murderer so that he would not appear to be a Muslim.

Yet, a page called “Death to America & Israel“, which actively incites violence against Israel, is left uncensored. Facebook, it seems, agrees that calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state is acceptable, but criticism of Islam is not. While pages that praise murder, jihadis, and anti-Semitism remain, pages that warn the public of the violence that is now often perpetrated in the name of Islam, but that do not incite violence, are removed.

Even in the United States, there was a Resolution proposed in the House of Representatives, H. Res. 569, attempting to promote the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s Defamation of Religion/anti-blasphemy laws, to criminalize any criticism of “religion” – but meaning Islam.

Yesterday, at an airport, an advertisement for Facebook read, “A place to debate.” Should it not instead have read, “A place to debate, but only if we agree with you”?

We should fear all censorship whenever and wherever we find it. We should welcome the right of anyone to speak. Not to allow differing points of view only entrenches positions by depriving people of the opportunity to hear anything that contradicts them. For those doing the censoring, that is doubtless the point.

But instead should we not be asking: who will be next? If voices, one by one, are silenced, who will be left to speak?

Robbie Travers, a political commentator and consultant, is Executive Director of Agora, former media manager at the Human Security Centre, and a law student at the University of Edinburgh.