The horrendous Bastille Day slaughter in Nice on July 14 was just the latest in a series of terrorist atrocities done for the sake of Allah in France. There have been so many that Wikipedia lists them in a table.  Nice was the 13th Islamic attack in France since December 2014 – all for the promise of 72 virgins in paradise. In January 2015, there was a mass shooting at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, which had dared to publish cartoons about Muhammad.

At the time, most of the media reported the story without showing any of the cartoons that had inspired the violence. If Charlie Hebdo had lampooned Christianity instead of the Muslim religion, nobody would have cared much about it. Yet to say anything negative about Islam publicly these days implies that you are racist, mean-spirited, and God (or should I say Allah) forbid, Islamophobic. Worse still, you are making yourself a target for reprisals.

Yet it’s my opinion that every single Western newspaper, magazine and TV news show should publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoon about Muhammad that appears at the beginning of this post. The Western media, rather than being scared into self-censorship—the most insidious form of censorship—should follow the example of the Danish people during the Holocaust. Virtually all Danish churches and political parties strongly opposed the deportation of Jews during Nazi occupation and were very public and vocal about it. The Danish people banded together to hide and evacuate their Jewish population. Thus casualties among Danish Jews during the Holocaust were among the lowest of the occupied countries of Europe—more than 99% survived. The Western media has allowed itself to be censored by Islamic nutcases who want to impose a misogynistic, medieval theocracy worldwide. Their foot soldiers are fanatical young men deluded by a myth of 72 virgins in paradise. The entire Western press, rather than just a few brave souls sticking their necks out, should declare zero tolerance of Islamic intolerance. Just as the Danes discovered, there is more safety in numbers.

However, clearly an Islamic shahid who has died fighting for Islamic causes and is allegedly rewarded with 72 virgins to bonk in paradise is being shortchanged. There were ancient esoteric Chinese sects where male adherents might be required to bed a thousand different women to practice various sexual techniques and the lucky fellows didn’t have to be dead before they could go through their quota of females. Some guys might consider this to be great work if you can get it, although it could turn sex into an endurance marathon. But who knows? Maybe they should have similar training for Catholic priests too, and then they wouldn’t need to go for all those altar boys. The women, however, would be unlikely to get much in the way of emotional commitment. Then you might well wonder how any girl could be particularly special or exciting to the guy after that number of partners—he would be bound to have bonked someone similar before.

Sadly, female Islamic martyrs are not promised 72 virgin males to service them in paradise. Supposedly their reward in the afterlife is to be beautiful and happy with only one man who is totally faithful to them. Clearly Islamic heaven must be divided into monogamous and polyamorous sections.

However the whole idea of a male Islamic martyr getting loads of virgins to bonk in paradise may be the result of an incorrect translation of the Koran when the book appeared in Arabic rather than in the earlier language of Aramaic. According to The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran, the word for grapes or wine has been mistranslated as maidens. As their cowardly acts of violence have shown, tolerance, a sense of humor and concern for human rights is not a common characteristic among Islamic fundamentalists. They resemble the irascible Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland who declares “off with their heads” at the slightest offense. The German scholar who wrote The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran, in fear of his life, chose to do so under a pseudonym, Christoph Luxenberg. He claims that the context of where the phrase appears in the Koran makes it clear that it is food and drink that is being offered, not unsullied maidens.

In addition, the exact number of heavenly virgins appears nowhere in the Koran but only in later Islamic writings. Why 72 lovers? Is it because virgins are so inexperienced, inhibited and fumbling that you’d need quantity and variety to make up for the lack of quality? Why not 42? After all, according to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, that number is the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Or why not the former British Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s total of 30, perhaps establishing an internationally-renowned Clegg Index? Whatever the number, you can see why fundamentalists might not like Luxenberg’s analysis—all they would be able to dangle in front of potential young male suicide bombers (or truck drivers) with raging hormones would be a bunch of grapes in paradise, not their own personal bevy of adoring, dark-eyed babes.