At First Things, Joseph Bottoms observes the chill in the air:

I’m on the board of a literary magazine at a small state university, and, at the board’s meeting this spring, the editor mentioned that he had wanted to reprint the blogger Iowahawk’s hilarious swipe at the archbishop of Canterbury. (If you haven’t read it, it’s worth a look: A description of the archbishop’s mention of a British application for Shari’a law, told as a lost Canterbury Tale, in pseudo-Chaucerian English.)

Unfortunately, the editor said, the magazine couldn’t reprint it. The legal adviser from the university’s administration had said no—not on the grounds that it was offensive to Anglicans and their archbishop, but on the grounds that it mentioned Islam, and the school could receive bomb threats as a result of publishing it.

This was the first time I’d encountered a straightforward admission of simple cowardice in these things, with no attempt to hide it under any cloak of multiculturalism or even good manners. The squeaky wheel gets the grease; the mob that might riot gets the deference; the group with the bombs gets the preemptive self-editing.

And look how far down it’s reached. I like what this new literary journal is trying to do. That’s why I’m on the board. But it is, in truth, a very minor start-up magazine, at a very minor state school. And it stops itself from republishing an already widely distributed parody of Anglicans—because the school’s administrators have internalized the message that Muslims cannot be mentioned in any unflattering context.