Although the recent beheading of a French teacher who showed a Charlie Hebdo cartoon of the prophet of Islam in the context of free speech occasioned this latest demand, in fact, Muslim calls to criminalize free speech against Islam regularly flare out whenever Muslims kill Westerners in the context of exercising their rights to free expression.

For example, in 2015,  after Muslim gunmen killed 12 people at Charlie Hebdo offices for publishing the same satirical  caricatures of Muslim prophet Muhammad, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the “collective voice of the Muslim world” and second largest inter-governmental organization after the United Nations, called—and is again predictably calling—for the United Nations to criminalize “blasphemy” against Islam, or what it more ecumenically calls, the “defamation of religions.”

Yet the OIC, Al Azhar, and countless other Muslim groups and individuals seem to miss the grand irony: if international laws would ban free speech, cartoons, books, and films on the basis that they defame Islam, they would also, by logical extension, have to ban the entire religion of Islam itself—the only religion whose core texts actively and unequivocally defame other religions, including by name.

What, then, do we do with Islam’s core religious texts—beginning with the Koran itself, which slanders, denigrates and blackens the reputation of other religions? Consider Christianity alone: Koran 5:73 declares that “Infidels are they who say God is one of three,” a reference to the Christian Trinity; Koran 5:72 says “Infidels are they who say God is the Christ, [Jesus] son of Mary”; and Koran 9:30 complains that “the Christians say the Christ is the son of God … may God’s curse be upon them!”

Considering that the word “infidel” (kafir) is not only Islam’s most derogatory term, but sharia requires Muslims to subjugate or kill infidels, what if a Christian book or Western cartoon appeared declaring that “Infidels are they who say Muhammad is the prophet of God—may God’s curse be upon them”? If Muslims would consider that a great defamation against Islam—and they would, with the attendant rioting, murders, etc.—then by the same standard it must be admitted that the Koran defames Christians and Christianity.

Similarly, consider how the Christian crucifix, venerated among millions, is depicted—is defamed—in Islam: according to canonical hadiths, when he returns, Jesus (“Prophet Isa”) will destroy all the crosses; as for Muhammad, who never allowed the cross in his presence, he once ordered someone wearing a cross to “throw away this piece of idol from yourself.”  Unsurprisingly, the cross is banned and often destroyed whenever visible in many Muslim countries.