This year the IHRC (Islamic Human Rights Commission) saw fit to offend not just good taste, however, but the very notion of human decency. Just a month after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, the IHRC gave the aggrieved survivors of the satirical magazine’s staff their “Islamophobe of the Year” award for 2015. Four thousand votes were cast to determine the “winner.” Even by the standards of the faith-addled, this was repugnant.

IHRC Chairman Massoud Shadjareh apparently suffered a bout of aphasia as he sputtered out a justification for the selection. Try to parse this: “If you are saying that satire should be disassociated from Islamphobic attacks, then surely satire can also be disassociated from the attacks [on Hebdo].” Without a hint of irony, but a little more comprehensibly, if disingenuously, Shadjareh added that “The reality is that this is a satirical thing and if people think Muslims should be on the receiving end of satire, then why cannot Muslims give it, too? The point made against Muslims regularly is that they do not have a sense of honour; they are portrayed as being dry and angry, but we have a sense of humour and we can give it back.” Though he called the Paris massacre “barbaric,” he also held the magazine accountable for the lethal violence erupting during the anti-cartoon protest marches in the Islamic world. The award, said the IHRC, was intended to be understood as “tongue in cheek.”

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In other Salon essays (see here, for example), I’ve denounced the semantic mud pie to which the noun “Islamophobia” amounts. The vogue term, with its echoes of mental illness and shame, should really be placed in quotation marks whenever used, or, far better, discarded as deleterious to rational discourse. In free societies, those who object to canonical Islam – to its universalist claims, to its explicit injunctions to commit violence against unbelievers, to its inherent misogyny – must have every right to air their opinions without fear of reprisal in the public square. (I am not suggesting by any means that all Muslims are prone to violence, but the extremists are determining the conversation.) Such opinions may, yes, cause offense to some Muslims (and to quite a few progressives beholden not to honest debate, but to PC speech codes), but so be it. Our right to discuss one of the most critical issues of our time has to trump the tender sensibilities of one or another group. There can be no compromise here, especially under threat of violence.

Nonetheless, the term Islamophobia is accepted, no doubt on account of the misguided postmodernists and post-structuralists who generally lead the media’s debate about religion. By holding that texts don’t mean what they mean, but are to be interpreted as mirrors for gender, race, age and power biases, plus, of course, our own needs of the moment, we lose the ability to comprehend them. The vast majority of Muslims in the rest of the world, however, remain untainted by postmodernism and accept the Quran as the word of God, and believe that it should be taken literally. ISIS assassins citing the Quran’s verses 8:12 or 47:4 as they behead their hostages are acting with scriptural sanction. Quoting Derrida or Foucault to an Islamist guerrilla wielding a sword above your head would be as ineffective as it would be presumptuous. Who are we to tell an ISIS executioner following commands inscribed in the Quran that he is “distorting” his religion? On what canonical grounds? If people are explicitly stating their motives, best to take them at their word. Otherwise, we risk becoming their apologists – and losing our heads, literally.