Will it get serious about ending Muslim extremism within its borders, or will it try even harder to curb offensive political cartoons and speech about Islam?

Up to this point, Europe has responded to Islamist violence in retaliation against ridicule, and even against sober critique of Islam, by taking the latter course.

In 2008, the EU mandated religious hate-speech laws, with European officials indignantly declaring that there is “no right to religious insult.” More revealingly, one official European commission delicately explained that this measure was taken to “preserve social peace and public order” in light of the “increasing sensitivities” of “certain individuals” who “have reacted violently to criticism of their religion.”

Europe was frightened and wanted to cool down its angry Muslim populations and appease the censorship lobby that claims to represent them in the 56-member-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Since 2004, it had seen the assassination of Theo van Gogh in an Amsterdam street for his and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s film on abuses against Muslim women; worldwide Muslim riots and economic boycotts over an obscure Danish newspaper’s caricatures of the Islamic prophet Mohammed; and yet more rioting and murders after Pope Benedict presented a paper to an academic audience at Regensburg University that questioned Islam’s position on reason.

The subjective hate-speech laws were intended to placate those — including Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who in 1989 issued a fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie — who demand that Europe police its own citizens for conformity to Islamic blasphemy codes. European leaders insisted that this could be accomplished while somehow still upholding Western principles of free speech.In the U.K., a British public-television broadcast was accused of “hate speech” and was subject to a police investigation for reporting on radical Muslim preachers.

Also in Britain, a congregation of an old Christian church, now surrounded by a new Muslim neighborhood, was convicted on a public-order offense for singing hymns on Sunday morning; the conviction was overturned late on appeal with the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom. In Finland, Helsinki city-council member Jussi Halla-aho was convicted for blog entries disparaging marriage practices of Islam’s prophet, which he attributed to Muslims more generally. In Austria, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted of defaming the prophet after giving a briefing based on her experiences working in Iran and Libya.

In the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, novelists, editors, legislators, philosophers, filmmakers, and cartoonists have been put through criminal investigations and trials and occasionally convicted for anti-Islamic speech. When it comes to Islam, women’s rights, child marriages, punishments for homosexuality, animal cruelty, immigration limits, and the legitimacy of violence are all topics that have given offense and triggered hate-speech prosecutions in Western Europe.