"Attempted to ban" isn't the same thing as "banned." There will always be nutballs trying to make cows wear pants. The key is not to have a society where you give them a gun.

The ALA describes books as being "challenged." Few are ever successfully banned.

The article was not so much about somebody trying to attack a book. As you say, this happens all the time. The article was about a government-funded literary agency going along with it.

IMO, the incident in the article isn't critical on its own--an award of some kind was withheld, but the book wasn't actually banned. Still, it's part of a much larger pattern. If you think this is the only example of knuckling under to offended Muslims over there, you haven't been reading your BBC as much as you used to.

America is still one of the best places to live on the planet. As one indicator of this, it seems like 99 percent of the people bitching about how other countries being better still live here, and oddly the immigration flow is still in our direction.