Regensburg Via Paris

It's the time of year when I pass along bits of gossip from a friend in Paris who teaches at University there. Friend says post-modernism is now declassé in France. Everyone's neo-Kantian now. That's an improvement? I ask. But if you need to be philosophically au courant, there you are.
Asked about the Pope's Regensburg lecture, friend passes along this twist. Says he for years the Archbishop of Paris has been inviting French Muslim leaders to "dialogue" about all kinds of things, especially terrorism, the relation of the Koran to violence, etc., and has always been rebuffed because the leaders said (paraphrasing)

If we talk openly about these things, our throats will be cut.

So friend's view (echoing others) is that the Pope was deliberately provocative, forcing the essential questions into the open and making dialogue possible --not so much for us, but for them. Not sure I buy that, but I toss it into the mix.