Spring 1989 will always remain as a kind of watershed in intellectual and world history. In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his infamous fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Immediately following in its wake came short interviews with or articles by Western intellectuals, Arabists, and Islamologists blaming Rushdie for bringing the barbarous sentence onto himself by writing the Satanic Verses. John Esposito, an American expert on Islam, claimed he knew "of no Western scholar of Islam who would not have predicted that [Rushdie's] kind of statements would be explosive." That is sheer hypocrisy coming from a man who has published extracts from Sadiq al-Azm's previously quoted book, that had also dared to criticize Islam.
Pakistani writer
Ibn Warraq is the pen name of an anonymous author critical of Islam.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
There are many reasons behind it. Bat Ye'or describes one of them in her new book "Eurabia": not long after the Second World War, the Europeans and especially France created a European-Arab axis, to lessen the influence of the USA. There were bilateral agreements. The EU launched Arab exchange programmes and financed Arab NGOs, creating strong European-Arab networks. If they were now to criticise anything about Islam that would upset their allies in the axis. Another reason is multiculturalism.