I’m late getting to this (don’t shout at me, it’s been a week full of impediments) but it’s worth not filing under “too late” because it’s so eloquent – James Kirchick at Index on Censorship tells Bruce Crumley why he’s such a weasel. I have little or nothing to add, I just want to quote the juiciest remarks.

As Christopher Hitchens wrote about the death warrant put out for his friend, “I thought then, and I think now, that this was not just a warning of what was to come. It was the warning. The civil war in the Muslim world, between those who believed in jihad and Shari’a and those who did not, was coming to our streets and cities.”

Over the past decade, that civil war has intensified on the streets of Western cities; Amsterdam, (where the artist Theo van Gogh was murdered in broad daylight for a film which criticized misogynistic Koran verses), Nyhamnsläge, (the Swedish village where the home of cartoonist Lars Vilks, who drew images of Mohammed, has been repeatedly attacked), Aarhus (the Danish town where fellow prophet-image-maker Kurt Westergaard had to hide in a “panic room” after an axe-wielding Muslim broke into his home).

And London, where the house of Martin Rynja of Gibson Square publishing was firebombed over a romantic novel about Aisha, and Seattle, where the cartoonist Molly Norris had to go into hiding after she drew a Motoon, and Birmingham, where Sikh protesters managed to get the play Behzti stopped.

It has thus been heartening to see this fundamental understanding among writers — that, no matter our political disagreements, we are all colleagues in a vitally important element of the free society — flower in response to a truly vile little excrescence by Bruce Crumley, the Paris correspondent for TIME magazine.

…Crumley, who would make an excellent propaganda commissar in Uzbekistan or Iran, chided French politicians for “denouncing the arson as an attack on freedom of speech, liberty of expression, and other rights central to French and other Western societies,” which is exactly what it was.

The original title of Crumley’s piece, still viewable in the website URL, was “Firebombed French Paper: A Victim of Islam, Or Its Own Obnoxious Islamaphobia?” If a reader, so offended by Crumley’s excuse-making for theocratic nutcases, bombs TIME’s Paris Bureau, would that make Crumley a “victim” of his own obnoxious cowardice? If there was ever cause to deport someone from the Republic of Letters it would be Crumley’s article, for in it he committed treason against his trade by showing himself to be a man eager to rat out his fellow writers and sell them down the river in a heartbeat.

Though he fashions himself a bold truth-teller, Crumley’s justification of violent extremism isn’t new. It’s just the latest iteration of a tired excuse for terrorism, expressed by everyone from Noam Chomsky to Ron Paul, which is that the victims of terrorism have it coming. What made Crumley’s entry into the genre singularly poisonous, and what I believe elicited the widespread disgust from journalists of all political stripes, is that it was written by a working journalist, not an academic, politician, or anti-“Islamophobia” activist.

There. I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss any of that.