1. DFW Council on American-Islamic Relations condemns Garland shooting
2. Why Pamela Geller is a hate-monger to critics, a free speech heroine to fans
3. Garland incident fuels concern about lone-wolf terror attacks
4. FBI sent out bulletin about gunman before Garland attack
5. Ads from sponsor of Garland Muhammad cartoon contest coming off Philadelphia buses
6. Iran gets ready for its third annual Holocaust cartoon contest

Those who argue that free speech has limits — that those who offend Islamists somehow bring deadly attacks upon themselves — simply haven’t thought it through. Someday, some of their own ideas are likely to be unpopular.

And that’s when the freedom of speech is most important.

By now, everyone has heard about the attempted attack in Garland on an event that was hosting a Mohammed cartoon-drawing contest. Two terrorists approached the venue, a Garland public school, and started shooting.

One police officer was hit — his injury was minor — but the two terrorists were immediately shot and killed by other cops.

This isn’t Paris; this isn’t London. We don’t disarm our police out of fear of offending criminals.

Instead, as a Garland police spokesman said, “We were able to stop those men before they were able to penetrate the area and shoot anyone else.”

In the wake of the attack, however, many are lamenting not the fact that self-identifying ISIS affiliates are in Texas trying to kill people, but the fact that a cartoon-drawing contest was held.

Here’s a Duke University professor.

“The group had every right to express its views and to do so without being threatened by or subjected to violence. That does not mean we need to honor the views that were being expressed by (participants) Mr. Wilders, Ms. Geller, or others in attendance,” said David Schanzer, a professor of the practice at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, and director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. “Everyone has a right to free speech, but also a responsibility to exercise that right in a way that is accurate, that truly informs public debate and understanding, and does so without, to the greatest extent possible, demeaning and degrading the deeply held views and beliefs of others.”

Two points here. First, anything that comes after the “but” in a sentence about the freedom of speech is wrong — and dangerous. Freedom of speech means nothing if it doesn’t mean the freedom to express unpopular ideas.

That’s vital because we know from history that most ideas are unpopular, at some point or another.

The abolition of slavery was a deeply unpopular idea, at one time. So was desegregation. Further back in history, the Reformation movement was, to use the words of Schanzer, “demeaning and degrading (to) the deeply held views and beliefs of others.”

The point is that if history is an arc, politics is still a pendulum. It swings between more liberal administrations and more conservative administrations. After a couple of presidential election cycles, it’s tempting to see a permanent majority, but that’s wishful thinking.

The second point is that Schanzer’s “but” is unworkable — and also dangerous — because he calls for speech that is “accurate and truly informs public debate and understanding.” Accurate according to whom? Who gets to decide what merely informs public debate and what “truly” informs it?

The right response to speech you don’t like is more speech — not less. Those terrorists in Garland were engaged in attempted censorship. Let’s not validate their efforts.