My brilliant friend Jeff Goldstein nails it in his post Identity Politics, Free Speech, and the Future of worldwide Liberalism.
At the core are the implicit flaws inherent in the dictum of both Multiculturalism and Political Correctness, best summarized by the brilliant, but fatally academic (I'll get to the 'fatally' in a moment) Professor Stanley Fish essay, 'Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech'.
The politics of difference is what I mean by strong multiculturalism. It is strong because it values difference in and for itself rather than as a manifestation of something more basically constitutive. Whereas the boutique multiculturalist will accord a superficial respect to cultures other than his own, a respect he will withdraw when he finds the practices of a culture irrational or inhumane, a strong multiculturalist will want to accord a deep respect to all cultures at their core, for he believes that each has the right to form its own identity and nourish its own sense of what is rational and humane. For the strong multiculturalist the first principle is not rationality or some other supracultural universal, but tolerance.
But the trouble with stipulating tolerance as your first principle is that you cannot possibly be faithful to it because sooner or later the culture whose core values you are tolerating will reveal itself to be intolerant at that same core; that is, the distinctiveness that marks it as unique and self-defining will resist the appeal of moderation or incorporation into a larger whole. Confronted with a demand that it surrender its viewpoint or enlarge it to include the practices of its natural enemies--other religions, other races, other genders, other classes--a beleaguered culture will fight back with everything from discriminatory legislation to violence.
At this point the strong multiculturalist faces a dilemma: either he stretches his toleration so that it extends to the intolerance residing at the heart of a culture he would honor, in which case tolerance is no longer his guiding principle, or he condemns the core intolerance of that culture (recoiling in horror when Khomeini calls for the death of Rushdie), in which case he is no longer according it respect at the point where its distinctiveness is most obviously at stake. Typically, the strong multiculturalist will grab the second handle of this dilemma (usually in the name of some supracultural universal now seen to have been hiding up his sleeve from the beginning) and thereby reveal himself not to be a strong multiculturalist at all. Indeed it turns out that strong multiculturalism is not a distinct position but a somewhat deeper instance of the shallow category of boutique multiculturalism.
This is the root-cause of our dilemma and why The Cartoon War may very well prove to be the watershed event, likely of equally defining importance for the 21st Century as the 1914 assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo was for the 20th.
Why 'fatally' academic? Because the perspective is skewed: "Confronted with a demand that it surrender its viewpoint or enlarge it to include the practices of its natural enemies [...] a beleaguered culture will fight back with everything from discriminatory legislation to violence.
Understanding Islam and its doctrine of global conquest as God's primary command, i.e. Jihad, turns all of these fine, academically sound considerations on its head. Jeff translates succinctly...
"The 12 cartoons ... have caused an uproar in the Muslim world and drawn a new cultural battle over freedom of speech and respect of religions."
Translation: “Free speech is good so long as it tolerates our right, as an identity group, to dictate which free speech is authentic and allowable. Otherwise, y’know, we get to torch shit.” [...]
But this lack of balance between the freedoms—rather than being exploited by the west to make its case for free speech and its necessity as the guiding principle of liberalism—is instead being exploited by neophyte identity politicians in the Muslim world, who have learned to play the victim card so quickly that our own State Department has bought into their affected outrage at victimization and religious “intolerance."
...and articulates best my beef with our official stance: "These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims," State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said in answer to a question. "We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable."
I want to stress here that I am most interested in the structural philosophy underlying this ostensible “clash of civilizations”; I recognize that there are often pragmatic reasons for individual acts of compromise and conciliatory action. But when those acts become a philosophy unto themselves—and it is western liberalism that is modifying or finessing its core beliefs in order to get along—then I think we’ve reached a point of serious concern. As a real world example that doesn’t single out the failures of activist progressivism, I would suggest that foreign policy realism, today most prominent in the entrenched bureaucratic thinking of the State Department, suffers from similar philosophical difficulties
It is important to distinguish between the pointing out of—and the protesting against—what some may see as needless provocation, and what others might characterize as effective, pointed political speech. Hell, Ted Rall teaches us that every day. Nevertheless, the potential rhetorical force is in the eye of the beholder, which is why we don’t hold back fair criticisms simply out of fear of giving offense. The restrictions we put on free speech arise out of practical concerns, one of which should not be the threat of intentional violence by those who disagree with the substance of a critique that is not meant as an act of instigatory violence. Re: the necessity of provocation, see Christopher Hitchens (h/t IP)
And the winner is:
Somehow, it seems to escape those raised on westernized Orientalism that by calling the intolerance of intolerance “intolerant,” they have reduced the concept of tolerance itself to a cruel semantic joke—the idea being that groups formed around cultural similarities, once they have honed their group message and excommunicated the dissenters—own the narrative. Outside criticism is therefore inauthentic—always tainted by the gaze of the Other, and so only to be considered secondarily (if at all) as a valid critique.
From there, it is a short journey to asserting the absolutism of a cultural paradigm—and this happens necessarily where universality (or, for postmodernists, social contracts that rely on the trappings of what is metaphysically untenable) is surrendered to competition between identity groups over primacy of “rights” in the global sense.
As I said, The Cartoon War, the Sarajevo of the 21st Century.
Rick makes a good argument @ The Right Wing Nuthouse, and so does Rusty @ My Pet Jawa. Latest about the MSM downplay from Michelle Malkin.
A massive round-up @ Instapundit, and a very important video compiled by Michelle Malkin, as well as the round up @ Gateway Pundit with the unpleasant news of the Danish Embassy in Damascus being burned to the ground. The building also happens to house the Sweedish and the Chilean Embassies.
Don't miss Hugh Hewitt interviewing Mark Steyn on these and other issues over @ Radioblogger. Audio here, and transcript here.
Neo-neocon's slamdunk:
[...] I've written before that one pitfall of tolerant societies is tolerance of the intolerant. When all alternate beliefs are respected and supported, what happens to those who, in the name of the tolerance of others for them, seek to impose their beliefs that freedom of speech be limited to that which does not offend them?
[...]
The intolerance of Islamicist extremists runs very deep: they feel that they should be able to impose their own standards on the European societies they have entered but not embraced. In their successful attempt--encouraged by European tolerance--to keep their own customs and religion and culture, they have failed to adopt the most important tenet of Enlightenment thought: the idea that they cannot dictate their own mores to others.
[...]
At that point a society must choose, and that's the point Europe is facing at the moment. I have written about this "tolerance of intolerance" question before, here. But I think it bears repeating:Tolerance should not be tolerant of intolerance, or it sows the seeds of its own destruction.
[...]
The bottom line is that members of a society must adhere to the rules of that society or face the consequences. Islamicist fanatics in Europe see their opportunity to remake the rules, and see a chink in the armor of Europe’s Enlightment secularism. How Europe chooses to respond will help to determine the course of its own future, and perhaps much more.
UPDATE I: Michelle Malkin takes the MSM to task in IT IS NOT A "ROW"
Have you noticed how international newspapers and television stations are doing their best to downplay the global conflagration over the Cartoon Jihad? — And on and on and on. — A "row" is a quarrel. Married couples have "rows" over laundry and finances.
Thanks to our "Guest at the feast" Mark Steyn tells us why 'Sensitivity' can have brutal consequences.
And now its the Danish consulate in Beirut which is ablaze. Who's next? Of course, at the end of the CNN article, the disclaimer: "CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons out of respect for Islam". Please help me NOT TO MISS shoving this down their throat when they next cheerfully 'blaspheme' any other religion!
And the Telegraph states it how it is: Democracy has a gun held to its head
What is completely unacceptable is that this debate should be carried out in a climate of fear.
For let us not delude ourselves: it is violence, or the threat of violence, that has driven the decisions that have been made in the past week. At a time when reasonable dialogue is most needed, the supposed custodians of our democracy are allowing a gun to be held to its head.
Dr. Sanity paraphrases William Blake and gives us the take of best-selling author and Muslim dissident Ibn Warraq in the German left-wing magazine 'Der Spiegel'. I didn't think I'd see the day when these guys come out all guns blazing for a righteous cause:
Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize. [...]
This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. [...]
The west is the source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the west that has raised the status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of enquiry, expression and conscience. No, the west needs no lectures on the superior virtue of societies who keep their women in subjection, cut off their clitorises, stone them to death for alleged adultery, throw acid on their faces, or deny the human rights of those considered to belong to lower castes. [...]
Freedom of expression is our western heritage and we must defend it or it will die from totalitarian attacks. It is also much needed in the Islamic world. By defending our values, we are teaching the Islamic world a valuable lesson, we are helping them by submitting their cherished traditions to Enlightenment values.
How's that for a black sense of humor:
In London, a crowd of 1,000 Muslims clutching orange placards demonstrated outside the Danish embassy. Two dressed as suicide bombers were allowed to stand next to a police van while officers - who had made no arrests the previous day - tried to prevent photographers from taking pictures of them. [...]
One of protesters, Mehdi Gashi, 26, originally from Kosovo but now living in London, said the cartoons degraded the Prophet. "There's one cartoon of the Prophet with a bomb on his head and this intimates that he is the root of terror, that Islam is terrorism, which is very insulting."
UPDATE II: Meanwhile, Jihad Momani, the only Arab editor who had the courage to publish some of the Muhammad cartoons, has been arrested by the Jordanian authorities. Last Thursday Mr Momani’s paper, al-Shihan, published three of the cartoons, including the one of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. The cartoons were accompanied by an editorial in which Mr Momani wrote that suicide bombers and terrorists slashing throats of hostages in front of cameras cause much more harm to Islam than these drawings. Before the day was over Mr Momani had been sacked, while all remaining copies of the paper were destroyed by the publisher, Arab Printing Company.
Mr Momani was forced to offer public apologies. “I ask Allah’s forgiveness and express my apologies for the serious mistake that I made in Shihan. It was a mistake that happened unintentionally and was caused by my enthusiasm to defend our faith,” he said.
Yesterday the Brussels-based Flemish newspaper De Morgen interviewed Mr Momani over the phone. The Jordanian journalist appeared to be in a panic. According to the interview, which was published today, he told De Morgen:
“I cannot assess what severe penalties await me.”
It is possible that the authorities arrested Mr Momani today in order to protect his life from assassins, but it is also possible that they will prosecute him for blasphemy. During the interview he also told the Brussels paper that he still holds the opinions he defended in his editorial.
“The frenzied reactions to the publication of the cartoons is out of all proportions and does the Muslim cause more harm than good. […] I could have published the editorial without the three illustrations, but I chose not to do so. Look, it has been five months since the cartoons were published in Denmark. […] I wanted to show the people why they were so furiously protesting in the streets, as these are only a few silly pictures. I thought it might defuse the situation a bit if people saw the actual cartoons.”
Mr Momani said he is himself a Muslim and realizes perfectly well that the cartoons can be offensive.
“These pictures are really insulting to us. I myself was not happy when I saw them […] But to react to them in such an extreme way is a big mistake and can be as foolish. That is what I wanted to make clear.”
Mr Momani had not imagined that the publication could lead to his dismissal. He said he felt let down by the Jordanian government.
“I feel hunted down. I am very disappointed in our government. There are thousands of ordinary Muslims who completely agree with me, but this inquisition is being inflated to a religious war by certain people, and certainly by those with power. That is a dangerous and foolish thing to do.”
The jailed Mr Momani is the first victim of the Cartoon War. His fate should concern all of us – including the timid American press.
UPDATE III: Here we go: Catholic priest shot dead in church in Turkey. Michelle Malkin is tireless:
An Italian Roman Catholic priest was shot dead in his church in the Turkish Black Sea city of Trabzon on Sunday, police said. Motive not known. Michelle has an update. That guy "Allah Akbar" seems to be back again. Ahem.
Jim Geraghty's take on Turkish reaction to the Cartoon Jihad is here.
***
Reader Brent A. writes with background info about the church where the Italian Catholic priest was shot:
I was at that church back in 2001 with my girlfriend at that time. She was Turkish and Muslim from Trabzon (I was stationed at Incirlik Air Base), and thought that she would show me something that would interest me. She took me to the Catholic Church because in her mind, and many Turks' minds, Catholics and Protestants have as much distinction as Sufi's, Sunni's, Shi'ites, and Wahabi's do in our ours. Her goal was to prove to me that Turkey does have other religions besides Islam. It was the only Catholic Church in Trabzon, and I don't believe there is usually more than one per city anywhere in Turkey.
Most of your readers probably think the church is situated like they are here in America, you drive up, park, and then walk in. In Turkey, the Catholic Churches are located behind fortress like walls with no indication of what is behind the wall. They have two gates: one for pedestrian and one for deliveries. Usually only those scheduled deliveries are allowed in the delivery gate. Unscheduled deliveries were turned away. At the pedestrian gate, you knock on the gate and someone comes answer to see what you want. If you clear their cursory check, they let you in. In Izmir, they had a gate guard that screened visitors. In Trabzon, one of the helpers or the priest himself would answer the gate. In both churches, in Izmir's and Trabzon's, if you were European/American, you were usually cleared in with little fuss. They were a little more thorough with the Turks, not due to terrorist reasons, but Turkey has a law against prosletyzing.
It is supposed to be applied to all religions, including Islam, but in practice is more geared toward the other religions. They screen them so they don't run afoul of this law. When I was there, the priest was from Germany and spoke German, Turkish, and English. He told me that they were usually rotated through this particular church every few years as the congregation was pretty small, mainly foreigners living in Trabzon for various reasons, and there wasn't much other work outside the church they could do because of the prosletyzing law. They had to be careful of what they did down town so it wouldn't be construed as the Catholic Church trying to move in and take over. Since the priest was the only fatality, my guess is that he was alone in the Church when the bell rang (you have to pull a rope that rings a bell to let someone know you're out there) and he came to answer the gate. When he opened it, that is probably when they shot him. You can park right outside the gate. Anyway, my main thrust was to let you know how the churches are built in Turkey.
Mosques there are a lot like churches here, you can pretty much walk up to the door anytime of day, but they have people there to make sure you're properly dressed to enter, such as women have their headscarfs on. The only Mosque in Turkey that I saw that waived the headscarf rule was the Blue Mosque in Istanbul because of all the Tourists. All the other Mosques would allow tourists in as long as they complied with the dress requirements.
I ask again, what next....
Related on ATB:
Religious Dogma Has No Place In A Secular Society
Take A Walk On The Wild Side
The Cartoon War
The Effect Of Our Holy Trinity Of Multiculturalism, Moral Equivalence And Relativism On The War Of Destiny
The Jihad Apocalypse 'A Muslim Obligation'
The Clash of Civilizations
The Enemy Within'
Secular Democracy Held To Ransom
More @ Captain's Quarters, Stop The ACLU, Wizbang, Daily Pundit, Right Wing News, Power Line, Secular Blasphemy, The Brussels Journal, History News Network, Gateway Pundit, The Moderate Voice, neo-neocon, Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, California Yankee, JunkYardBlog, The Glittering Eye, Decision '08, Mudville Gazette, The Sundries Shack, Danske øjne … Dean's World, The Astute Blogger, Publius Pundit, BBC Outside The Beltway, The Volokh Conspiracy Andrew Sullivan, Ed Driscoll, Mark in Mexico, Telegraph, A Blog For All, Argghhh!, La Shawn Barber's Corner, Iowa Voice, The Corner on National. TigerHawk, Gina Cobb, Althouse, Tim Blair, Point Five, Guardian, littlegreenfootballs
Can America be all things to all people?
Is America still a highway of freedom or has she become a “Pimps’ Paradise”?
To the extent that a pimp is one who facilitates sexual relationships between one woman and many men; men who, of course, have only exploitative interest in the woman, and to the extent that the woman, being exploited is made to be and do whatever each man wants of her; the woman becomes all things to all men. Some people may argue that the woman is equally exploiting the men that take momentary possession of her, but that is hardly the point to be made in the context of this subject or the preceding allegory.
One could also argue that for the most part, if not always, none of the men who take momentary ownership of the woman cares about her and none of them would value the real essence of her womanhood, as to treat her with respect. When she becomes used up, perhaps ravaged by all the diseases deposited in her by all the wayfarers that passed though her gates and drank from her well but never gave her any care, she is abandoned— like a dry well, like a plagued city or like a sunken pirate vessel.
For another allegory, perhaps I could also borrow an excerpt from Theodor Billroth’s description of statistics, which implies that a woman ought to be a mirror of “purest virtue and truth”, not a whore to “use as one pleases”. Likewise, American must be the same thing to all people—a country founded on individual equality and the freedom of each individual, a freedom that remains in fidelity to the truth enshrined in the essence of freedom itself.
America the idea and the America country, symbolized by the motto “E pluribus Unum” (Out of many, one) can not long endure as long as that providential idea of individual equality and outpost of freedom is increasingly marginalized by a substantive shift towards a position that is clearly antithetic to what the founders envisioned, a situation that could be equally described as “Out of one, many”; as each one and each group seeks to make America a profusely “multicultural society”, whether or not the culture is diametrical to the essential American ideal and whether or not the “freedom” that is exercised has fidelity to the essential truth of freedom.
As America continues on the path of becoming all things to all people, as she is remade in the many images of all that pass through her gates and drink from her well, she continues to lose a sense of her deeper self and continues to die a slow death of self-forgetfulness. As one group demands that the truth about the cast system that holds some people as untouchables be expunged from American history books, just because it is an embarrassment, hence offensive to them. In complying with their demand and to the extent that these are Americans who uphold the cast system, albeit outside America, the cast system, indirectly and by extension becomes one of America’s cultures.
There is another group demanding that freedom of speech be curtailed or suspended when it comes to issues concerning their religion, particularly with unsavory tendencies, such as the oppression of women. To them, any speech that questions such tendencies or practices inspired thereby; constitutes an insult to their religion, hence an offense to them. In complying with their demand too, and to the extent that they too are “Americans”, who support the oppression of women and violence against dissenters, albeit in far away lands, such oppression of women and violence against dissenters, indirectly and by extension becomes one of America’s multi-cultures.
There are as yet many more groups. Some deny the foundational principle for the declaration of America’s independence, the principle that also inspired the American Constitution. They believe that all men are not created equal, that they themselves are superior to others, a view that brought America so great a shame. They seek to redact the truth of that shame from America’s consciousness. Some seek to expunge the truth about life from the American conscience. Some deny even the basic concept of law. Some deny the essential nature of man and woman, and the natural imperatives that demand their union and the attributes thereof—attributes that under guard the stability of society and human perpetuity.
As yet, there are others who reject a common unifying language, instead seek a multi-lingual society as the vehicles of multiculturalism. Other “Americans”, remain citizens of many nations, to them patriotism holds a marginal value. And there are yet many more, over two hundred groups, each with its own demands on America, groups who should be transformed rather than transform the essential nature of America. Hence, America the melting pot of peoples and cultures has become America the salad bowl of peoples and cultures—all in the same bowl but separate.
For America to remain an inspiration to the world, which until America came into existence and hitherto has not seen anything like America the country or America the idea—a beacon of hope and inspiration for freedom, America must not forget her true self, by becoming all things to all people. America must remain the same thing to all people.
Posted by: slowtrain | Thursday, March 02, 2006 at 01:06 PM
I have come around to the agreement that this whole cartoon "war" maybe indeed the watershed event that ignite the war between the west and Muslims.
Posted by: Huan | Tuesday, February 07, 2006 at 08:38 AM
I wonder, has anyone has seen anything on the reaction of the Danish, Norwegian, and French populations to this whole deal? I’ve heard from some leaders, some commentators, and some newspaper editors but not much on the pulse of the people themselves.
Posted by: Stefan | Monday, February 06, 2006 at 02:11 PM
Guest, I love your idea of closing their embassies and stopping the visas. I think we in the west should take advantage of every loophole they open up in that department and start being tough and closing some of those doors! I don't know about the rest of you but I am sick and tired of our free speech being held hostage!
Look over at Egypt where they are losing it and attack the company of that ferry!!!! Now a priest is shot in Turkey? Flags are burning and jihad chants are in the streets all over! I tell you, the muslims around the world living in democracies should be condemning all this violent behavior of their fellow anger driven muslims because all it does is make the other people in the west look at all of them and wonder when they might go off on their own jihad spree of anger! Seriously, who can trust anyone that practices islam right now? What if the mosque down the street starts preaching about cartoons and offers a call to take up the sword over it? I know that sounds cruel to say, but in all honestly, how the hell does anyone know what western city is the next target or who is the next radical muslim that is going to freak out and be offended over a cartoon or a cartoon look alike? Remember the ridiculous protest over the ice cream that looked like allah's name in writing? I mean think about it, what if all of a sudden some 'crazy' decides that the way you mow your grass is leaving some "hidden" insulting imprint in the yard when the wind blows it a certain way? I know that sounds absurd, but with the slightest of things that have flaired up the savages...one can only wonder...just like Alexandra asked...What's next??????
*sigh* God help us all!
Posted by: Liquid | Monday, February 06, 2006 at 07:05 AM
Anybody notice a pattern that when muslims are doing horrific things that clerics and Islamic government officials almost immediately come out and say "those muslims don't represent Islam, they are radicals"? It's always the same mantra. I saw the pictures of the "little rascal" aged muslim children carrying sign's calling for the decapitation of those who insult Islam. It can only get worse as more and more of those children are being brought up with nothing but the desire to commit genocide on non-muslims. Behold the future.
Posted by: Nasty_Ninety | Monday, February 06, 2006 at 02:02 AM
NB- here, this is what I am talking about. Compare the attitude of the following two speeches and you will understand what I am talking about:
"We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even
if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old."
Winston Churchill, June 4, 1940, speech before the House of Commons
"We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want to be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies."
-- Ehud Olmert, June 9, 2005, speech to Israel Policy Forum
in New York.
People who are tired of being courageous, and tired winning, ending up being cowardly, and losing. It is actually quite simple.
Posted by: Guest at the Feast | Monday, February 06, 2006 at 01:55 AM
Stefan, the person you heard was Shaykh Abu Hamza al-Masri (aka Mustafa Kamel Mustafa)- another living refutation of the liberal "poverty-and-desperation" theory. Raised in a middle class Egyptian household, he came to England in 1979 to study civil engineering; like many of the Islamic radical leaders, he became an Islamist only AFTER obtaining a Western education and after deep exposure to the West. He lost a hand and the vision in one eye fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and for the past ten years has been Bun Ladin's most outspoken supporter in Britain.
The question you raise is dead on target, Stefan: the best proof that this Jihadist attitude is mainstream Islam is the fact that no Muslim scholar will or can unequivocally condemn the fight against Infidels. Oh, they'll condemn the attacks inside the Muslim world- but not on, say, US ships in the Persian Gulf, civilians in Israel or anywhere else for that matter.
Now, this does not mean that we have to go out and behave like our enemies; but, given their mentality, it does mean that we have to be strong, act strong, and convince them that we are too strong to meddle with. Note that it is only when the West is perceived as weak that these types of people become emboldened: in the case of the Danes, it was the initial weakness, and years of European appeasement, that led to this escalation.
The best way, always, to prevent a war with bullies is by demonstrating that you are too tough for them to defeat. This has been proven time and again throughout history- particularly the history of the past hundred years. Moreover, under Islamic religious law, it is the only excuse a Muslim has for holding the Jihad in abeyance: overwhelming military superiority of the enemy.
The proper reaction to this fracas would be for every newspaper in the West to print the cartoons, and for every Western government to come out strongly and explain that, unlike in the Islamic world, our government's are neither responsible for nor in control of what newspapers publish. If the Danish embassy is burned down in Syria or in Lebanon, the European Union should close the Syrian and Lebanese embassies in their countries, and stop issuing visas to nationals of those countries. You'd be amazed by how quickly they would start behaving themselves over there.
Posted by: Guest at the Feast | Monday, February 06, 2006 at 01:39 AM
Interesting, isn't it, that the three most offensive cartoons were drawn and distributed by "moderate" Danish Muslims, who lied and said the Danish paper published them? Apparently depicting Muhammed is a situational ethics sort of thing - if it serves the purposes of jihad it's fine - if it doesn't, it's an offense worthy of death.
Speaking of offensive images, Captain's Quarters posted a photo of a "protester" (The World Can't Wait - pushing for Bush's impeachment because he has the audactity to actually take his job seriously) in Washington (D.C.) carrying a sign with an "artist's" depiction of Bush, beheaded and dripping blood, being held by the hair by an arm and hand of someone. Riots immediately broke out across the country, with conservatives threatening to kill anti-war protesters whereever they could be found - oh wait - that didn't really happen - a few people grumbled.
If you can still make excuses for the Muslim world after their reaction to the cartoons (some signs said, "Prepare for the REAL holocaust" and some chanted, "Nuke the Danes! Nuke the French! Nuke the US!"), then you're not a member of any reality-based community. You're insane. You've completely lost your grip on reality.
If you don't see the Muslim world as a serious threat to world stability, then you lack the intelligence to understand simple, short phrases - you know - like "Take Their Heads Off!" (Their Heads refers to YOU, my friend.)
Posted by: antimedia | Monday, February 06, 2006 at 12:55 AM
Its good to see people trying to alert the American public (liberals and those who just don't care) about the evil of Islam. But until people actually have some of their friends or family killed or have to walk to work or endure something that busts their little bubble of reality...
They. won't. understand. or even. care.
The Cult of Islam has been around hundreds and hundreds of years and it is unchanged in its purpose and its manners. It is guided and scripted by the Qur'an which can not be revised or disrespected.
It is going to be a long war, those of us that understand will just have to carry those that don't and try and protect them.
Like that old saying, maybe they think that the monster will eat them last.
Well, better for them to see what their ignorance has brought them.
Papa Ray
West Texas
USA
Posted by: Papa Ray | Monday, February 06, 2006 at 12:55 AM
Well Jeremiah, most of us in the USA know that we are at war...the result of these cartoons has been that it PROVEN beyond a shadow of a doubt that the typical stereotype (including some depicted by the cartoons themselves)that has been said about the violent nature of the followers of the prophet muhammed via the quran is true. Kinda tosses that "religion of peace" out the door eh? Remember...by their fruits you shall know them!
Posted by: Liquid | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 11:48 PM
What do you call this whole escalating mess? "The Eurabian Rave"?
Theo van Gogh ... "honor" killings (in Europe, too, btw) ... priest assassination (Turkey) ... 1,001 torched cars ... now these cartoons and the reprisals.
Or isn't it more accurate to call burning down foreign governments' embassies - not to mention the host governments' inabilities/unwillingness to defend them - acts of war?
Posted by: Jeremiah | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 11:12 PM
The cartoonists did not, "know what was coming." Nobody did.
The cartoonists did know this. FEAR - not "respect for the religion of Islam" (please) was strangling freedom of expression in Europe.
They did not chose to piss off Muslims, or to unleash fury, they chose to prove that (some) Europeans would not be intimidated into giving up their right to speak their minds, recognizing that, if you give that up, you are not in any meaningful sense of the word, "free."
The violence that has resulted is entirely the fault of those who have CHOSEN to react violently to a provocation that Christians, Jews, Mormons, and many others are all to familiar with, and regularly endure without massive, public exhortations to violence and hate.
Posted by: Randall | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 10:00 PM
I remember hearing a radio piece done by the BBC (head via NPR of all places) dealing with radical Islam in London. It was last summer so I don’t remember which cleric they were talking to but, they listened in to his “sermon” which called for the dismantling of Britain’s entire society and its replacement with an Islamic state and sharia law. Afterwards, they interviewed this cleric, who England had accepted as a political refugee, from whatever country he had been expelled from (I forget which), for inciting the overthrow of the ruling regime. They asked him if he found it ironic that the western freedoms that allowed him to speak openly like this were the exact things he was seeking to destroy. He laughed smugly and declared that he had every intention of using those freedoms allowed to him by English society to bring about its downfall. He essentially said that if you dare try to stop me I will cry bloody murder and you will be forced by your own standards to defend me. If you do not I will rail about the glaring hypocrisy and discrimination in your society and you will be forced to betray your most precious beliefs thereby ruining your own freedoms. These are not the words of an uneducated, backwards, or naïve person; or the ranting of a deranged lunatic. They show and great understanding of the tensions in a free society and they show a clever, ruthless, and carefully orchestrated stratagem. This is not the blustering of the mob. To underestimate those that profess this dangerous ideology as simple religious fanatics is foolish. Again, I am troubled by the dilemma of the nature of Islam itself. If we decide that the trouble is not just from a small radical sect of Islam, but rather this radicalism itself is a natural extension of Islam’s core system of beliefs then we have declared our opposition to the very heart of the population of the Middle East. This would make our enemies not Bin Laden and his ilk but Islamic culture it its totality. I am not willing to make this leap because it is the recipe for a cataclysm and I still have hope in the US strategy of spreading democracy (even the results are not to our liking) but I can not see the horizon from here. Once again, Europe finds itself on the front line in a global conflict and what happens there is the key.
Posted by: Stefan | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 07:42 PM
Hi all - check out Alexandra's Update I and II above. I am particularly disturbed by the interview of Jihad Momani, the only Arab editor who had the courage to publish some of the Muhammad cartoons and was subsequently sacked and arrested. It's bone chilling and adds the all-important human touch to this unfolding nightmare.
Liquid, the palpable sense of trauma Mr Momani is experiencing right now, this very minute, really drives your point home:
Posted by: North by Northwest | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 05:37 PM
I have been pretty busy lately, so I am just now catching up on this one thread...
The Guest at the Feast totally is giving you guys the "panoramic view" of things. He/or She is spot on to what has and is taking place. I think of all the post here that has responded, 'The Guest' has the best perspective on the reality of things.
I have to admit, I giggled at some of the Oscar Wilde quotes by some on here of "A gentleman offends no one unintentionally." Perhaps this person doesn't realise that everyday, muslims are encouraged to scour around for something to be offended about and then to report it. In the USA this is what fuels and feeds the likes of the ACLU and CAIR.
I also don't know why people continue with the "poverty and uneducated" argument anymore, especially when it has been proven that most of the suicide bombers today are not either.
I think there is a grand denial mixed with fear amongst those that still haven't gotten educated themselves on the ideology; the ideology that is unleashing it's jihad and bullying it's own to come out and fight the "infidels of the west" This ideology has spawned everything around hate and masked itself under the label of peace. So many have been decieved by it. This ideology is a forked tongued in that it demands respect but doesn't give it. If you were to go live in any Islamic country, you will understand that it has double standards and yet when this ideology immigrates into the western world, packed with it's agenda, it demands respect of it's new host country under it's old country's culture's laws!
People can respect people as it's an earned two way street but people do not have to succumb to other people's ideology when that ideology is about political domination and undermining our govt and desiring ultimately to force others into bowing down to a pagan god! If anyone isn't happy in their new host country and if anyone is longing for the punishment under sharia type laws then they should seek heading back home instead of demanding for the new country to change to fit it's agenda.
Certain people are working overtime behind and on the sidelines of the scene to spread sharia type islam into the west and polls have shown that they don't hide their desires and for you that don't really understand what their ultimate goals are then I suggest you get a quick education. Its easy to join in with those that "cry victimhood" because that is a natural response, but look deeper and you will see that it's part of a strategic ongoing plan.
Remember, many of us have never been stripped of our freedoms, because we are a people of luxury that haven't the slightest clue of what it's like to wake up one day and have our "rights" taken away, and that is why it is so much more important for this group to take on the responsibility of understanding what is truly going on, because we have been blessed with the taste and fruit of freedom therefore we should not wait until it's torn and weak to start grasping tighter to it! If you cherish your freedom then you must fight for it. Much blood was shed so that you could have it and if it means anything to you then you should pay attention to what is going on today!
Remember also that we fight battles of principal every day and when you have muslims trying to say that 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of expression' doesn't applly here in the west to this issue, then you better sit back and rethink it... because here in the west there is NO religion and there is NO govt and there is NO person that is above any other that deserves exclusion from being criticised! Without the ability to scrutinize we lose our freedom to think! When you give up your freedom to think...then it's all over!
BTW Alexandra, great information in this thread! Thank you as always for the hard work!
Posted by: Liquid | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 03:58 PM
Mr. Marshall has been answered with great effectiveness on this thread, but his subway analogy (at Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 12:36 AM) is irresistible.
Marshall wrote: "But the world we live in is now like traveling the subway, or hanging out in a crowded bar. You begin spitting in somebody's face, you're likely to start a brawl. And the brawl might even have a tragic end, but it will not go on forever."
The proper subway analogy would be evening in a subway car half filled with a diverse group of commuters, all on their individual legitimate errands. A smaller group of teenage punks enters the car. The punks begin to disrupt things with loud trash-music and graffiti. The commuters all look down at the floor, their NYT, latest novel, anything to avoid a problem. Encouraged by this inaction, the punks progress to teasing and jostling the commuters. Still no commuter response. The punks then move on to aggressive panhandling, perhaps groping a female commuter and maybe even a stomp. At this point some of the commuters raise their heads and begin to discuss among themselves the nature of this threat, perhaps as a way to steel themselves to an effective resistance.
Marshall seems to find this discussion among the commuters (for example, the excellent cartoon of the bomb hidden in Mohammed’s turban) to be equivalent to spitting in the face of the Ummah. I would say it is a hopeful sign that the West is beginning to look for its courage.
Mr. Marshall, with all due respect, I suspect that you haven’t put in too many late-night hours on a subway through the rough part of town.
Posted by: MarcH | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 02:37 PM
Go to http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/freespeech1 to sign a petition in support of Denmark.
Posted by: Holger | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 11:26 AM
Cute, Kenny- and, as usual, good points. No, liberalism is indeed not suffering from a surfeit of empiricism; in fact, I should say that it has proven singularly impervious to empirical evidence. The old classic on Jihad, Alfred Morabia's "Jihad dans l'Islam" is living proof of that; he brings all the grim evidence, and then basically draws optimistic conclusions divorced from all the evidence he has spent several hundred pages meticulously laying out...a triumph of wishful thinking over empirical reality. Anyone interested in reading the latest word (scholarly, but readable) on Jihad should go look at David Cook's "Understanding Jihad" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
Tankerboy, according to our friends the Saudis, Egyptians, et al., and our not-such-good-friends the Iranians, Islam and the governmental system known as democracy are indeed incompatible; this is why they view Bush's grand (or grandiose) visions as hubris, and cultural imperialism. Democracy is the rule of man and Islam is the rule of God; either one accepts that society is ordered by majority will or one accepts that society is ordered by divine will. Now, maybe the Muslim theologians are wrong- but who are we to assert such a thing? And, with all due respect, self-proclaimed Muslim dissidents a la Irshad Manji (and they are precious few) are less religiously credible and carry incomparably less weight than Shaykh Qaradawi.
Posted by: Guest at the Feast | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 10:21 AM
Ah, yes, poverty, that root of all evil...hundreds of years ago Victor Hugo was nattering on about how all we had to do was give the poor education and food and evil would cease to exist. Whatever else liberalism is, it can't be accused of being unduly empiricist.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 10:02 AM
Guest,
Well, now you've messed up. Don't you know that Bernard Lewis is Jewish and therefore his scholarship is worthless? So much for your credibility, I fear... ;-)
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 09:59 AM
So here is my question, "Are Islam and Democracy compatible?" It does not appear that you can have freedom of expression, a core tenet of democracy, and Islam in the same room. For that matter, it does not appear that you can have freedom of religion, unless you pay a tax or accept a lesser citizenship, in an Islamic government.
Posted by: tankerboy | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 09:41 AM
The problem is not tolerance but tolerance driven by moral-cultural-relativism.
Without a standard of reference, there is no right or wrong, only "feelings."
Wolfie, poverty does not breed extremism. Read the histories of africa, asia, and latin america. Insurgencies in those regions are predicated on economics, not extreme ideologies. Certainly not anything espousing decapitations as a response to cartoons.
Posted by: Huan | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 09:08 AM
Wolfie,
I am sorry, but your history is a bit off. Saddam rose to power on the coattails of an indigenous "Arab Socialist Revolution"; if you need references, see Charles Tripp, "A History of Iraq," Majid Khadduri, "Republican Iraq," or Marion Farouk Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, "'Iraq Since 1958." The West had little to no control over what was going on inside 'Iraq after the 1958 Revolution.
Saudi Arabia was another indigenous Arabian movement, which the British actually did everything they could to prevent from taking over Arabia in the 1920s(the Hashemites were their clients, and they were afraid of radical Wahhabism). Yes, the US supported the Shah, but the French (at least nominally part of the West) gave the Ayatollah Khomeini shelter and facilitated his political activities. Moreover, the Shi'ites in the Persian Gulf area (most notably the mujtahids of Najaf and Karbala- the leading Shi'ite centers before Saddam suppressed them and the Islamic Revolution finally succeeded in Iran) were declaring Jihad against the West before WWI; hardly a product of Western imperialism, that...
Although it has become common in certain ideological circles to assert that Islamism is a product of poverty and poor education, actual empirical evidence demonstrates the opposite: in Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, wherever, it is the educated circles who are most susceptible to Islamism- Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the millionaire Usama b. Ladin, the London bombers, and the engineer Sayyid Qutb are not the huddled masses. The strongest supporters, the mainstay of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, were the so-called bazaaris, the middle-class to wealthy merchants of the urban centers (see the works of Mangol Bayat, Nikki Keddie, and others).
The problem with quasi-Marxist analysis has always been that it is reductionist; it would make of history a record of economics. While economics frequently plays an important role, it is a long, long way from being the only- or even the most important- factor in historical trends.
Moreover, irreligious people seem for some reason unable to grasp that other people- fully as well-educated, wealthy, and rational as they- could possibly be motivated by transcendental motives; yet it is the worst form of cultural imperialism, of condescension, to superciliously assume that anyone whose priorities are different from yours is merely "uneducated" and "misguided".
As the great Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis wrote ("The Significance of Heresy in the Study of Islam," Studia Islamica 1 [1953], p. 44): "When Europeans ceased to accord first place to religion in their thoughts, sentiments, interests, and loyalties, they also ceased to admit that other men, in other times and places, could have done so. To a rationalistic and materialistic generation, it was inconceivable that such great debates and mighty conflicts could have involved no more than 'merely' religious issues. And so historians...devised a series of explanations, setting forth what they described as the 'real' or 'ultimate' significance 'underlying' religious movements and differences." Ironically enough, in refusing to take seriously the Islamist ideology, Western liberals are actually confirming the accusations hurled against their culture by said Islamists: namely, that the West is materialistic, godless, utterly lost to all things spiritual, etc.
Every empirical study of Islamists that I have ever seen has demonstrated beyond a doubt that these people are well-educated and upper-middle to upper-class. Please adumbrate the contradictory scholarly evidence you have encountered- not the assertion of liberal blogs; empirical studies of actual Islamists that provided names, bios, educational level and SES enumerated. You will not find any.
Posted by: Guest at the Feast | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 09:01 AM
Of course I'm perturbed by racist propaganda in Islamic media in whatever form it may take; although I would counter that Sharon and Bush are politicians (not a religious figures) and therefore fair-game to the satiracist's plume. You are making an inference that I have not made, in that condemning these I condone the converse. Yes the fact that the illustrator could not find a publisher was poor but this "thought experiment" was clumsy and ill-judged. Its now a tragedy unfolding as mob-rule has taken its course in some parts of the Muslim world, as anyone with even half a wit could have predicted, but lets put it in perspective a moment. This is a few thousand individuals (mostly of poor education) out of 1.5 billion Muslims world-wide and I find it disturbing that the Media here in Europe and in the US are painting this as "clash of the civilizations" and "look at those mad Muslim hordes"; this is opportunism at its worst - and its happening on both sides of the street! Its a bit disingenuous to compare the behaviour of the wealthy, well educated west (who are too busy watching the Super Bowl to give a damn rather than being civilized and restrained) with people who are poor, uneducated and brain-washed by unelected corrupt leaders. Leaders that the west put there to ensure our cheap oil flows, i.e. Saudi Arabia, Saddam, The Shah of Iran (who's reign of terror ensured a revolutionary back-lash). I'm not wringing my hands with guilt over this believe me, these were the errors of the past. I'm just trying to put it in context. My point is, poverty breeds extremism and here in Europe we learnt that lesson the hard way over 60 years ago. The despots that our governments created and support (love those photos of Saddam and Rummy shaking hands) keep their populations poor in order to use them as pawns like this and we should be directing our ire at them.
Posted by: Wolfie | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 08:04 AM
Joseph
This is an important subject. And you are obviously disagreeing with my stance. But you are not dealing with the main subject, namely that of organized Jihad.
You say, "Diversity is a fact. None of the various religions, ethnic groups, and so on, are going to go anywhere else. So get used to it." You are of course picking an aspect which is entirely off topic and deliberately besides the crucial point I am making crystal clear in this post--I know you've grasped it because whenever one of my arguments resonates uncomfortably within you, you go out of your way to formulate the shortest, most disparagingly brush-off imaginable to you at the time, and this is one of your best, leaving me thusly encouraged.
I need you to address the issue of calls for Jihad which are clearly well orchestrated and organized and in which the cartoons are most evidently being used as a mere pretext. I need you to contemplate that this is so, even if you don't believe it to be, so as to understand what your projections might be and upon which rationale you are relying. Don't dodge this one with empty rhetoric, Joseph. This is serious and it effects all of us. As you were saying, "A prudent person makes some preparation for genuine danger", and doesn't scoff at very real issues by dismissing them a priori. I'd be disappointed if you couldn't rise above comparatively trivial partisan differences.
Posted by: Alexandra | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 07:47 AM
As usual, Mark Steyn gets to the crux of the matter in the wittiest and starkest fashion:
Mark Steyn
'Sensitivity' can have brutal consequences
February 5, 2006
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
I long ago lost count of the number of times I've switched on the TV and seen crazy guys jumping up and down in the street, torching the Stars and Stripes and yelling ''Death to the Great Satan!'' Or torching the Union Jack and yelling ''Death to the Original If Now Somewhat Arthritic And Semi-Retired Satan!'' But I never thought I'd switch on the TV and see the excitable young lads jumping up and down in Jakarta, Lahore, Aden, Hebron, etc., etc., torching the flag of Denmark.
Denmark! Even if you were overcome with a sudden urge to burn the Danish flag, where do you get one in a hurry in Gaza? Well, OK, that's easy: the nearest European Union Humanitarian Aid and Intifada-Funding Branch Office. But where do you get one in an obscure town on the Punjabi plain on a Thursday afternoon? If I had a sudden yen to burn the Yemeni or Sudanese flag on my village green, I haven't a clue how I'd get hold of one in this part of New Hampshire. Say what you like about the Islamic world, but they show tremendous initiative and energy and inventiveness, at least when it comes to threatening death to the infidels every 48 hours for one perceived offense or another. If only it could be channeled into, say, a small software company, what an economy they'd have.
Meanwhile, back in Copenhagen, the Danes are a little bewildered to find that this time it's plucky little Denmark who's caught the eye of the nutters. Last year, a newspaper called Jyllands-Posten published several cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, whose physical representation in art is forbidden by Islam. The cartoons aren't particularly good and they were intended to be provocative. But they had a serious point. Before coming to that, we should note that in the Western world "artists" "provoke" with the same numbing regularity as young Muslim men light up other countries' flags. When Tony-winning author Terence McNally writes a Broadway play in which Jesus has gay sex with Judas, the New York Times and Co. rush to garland him with praise for how "brave" and "challenging" he is. The rule for "brave" "transgressive" "artists" is a simple one: If you're going to be provocative, it's best to do it with people who can't be provoked.
Thus, NBC is celebrating Easter this year with a special edition of the gay sitcom "Will & Grace," in which a Christian conservative cooking-show host, played by the popular singing slattern Britney Spears, offers seasonal recipes -- "Cruci-fixin's." On the other hand, the same network, in its coverage of the global riots over the Danish cartoons, has declined to show any of the offending artwork out of "respect" for the Muslim faith.
Which means out of respect for their ability to locate the executive vice president's home in the suburbs and firebomb his garage.
Jyllands-Posten wasn't being offensive for the sake of it. They had a serious point -- or, at any rate, a more serious one than Britney Spears or Terence McNally. The cartoons accompanied a piece about the dangers of "self-censorship" -- i.e., a climate in which there's no explicit law forbidding you from addressing the more, er, lively aspects of Islam but nonetheless everyone feels it's better not to.
That's the question the Danish newspaper was testing: the weakness of free societies in the face of intimidation by militant Islam.
One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they'll marvel at how easy it all was. You don't need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that's a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural "sensitivity," the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want -- including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, hailed the "sensitivity" of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending cartoons.
No doubt he's similarly impressed by the "sensitivity" of Anne Owers, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, for prohibiting the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and thus is offensive to Muslims. And no doubt he's impressed by the "sensitivity" of Burger King, which withdrew its ice cream cones from its British menus because Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe complained that the creamy swirl shown on the lid looked like the word "Allah" in Arabic script. I don't know which sura in the Koran says don't forget, folks, it's not just physical representations of God or the Prophet but also chocolate ice cream squiggly representations of the name, but ixnay on both just to be "sensitive."
And doubtless the British foreign secretary also appreciates the "sensitivity" of the owner of France-Soir, who fired his editor for republishing the Danish cartoons. And the "sensitivity" of the Dutch film director Albert Ter Heerdt, who canceled the sequel to his hit multicultural comedy ''Shouf Shouf Habibi!'' on the grounds that "I don't want a knife in my chest" -- which is what happened to the last Dutch film director to make a movie about Islam: Theo van Gogh, on whose ''right to dissent'' all those Hollywood blowhards are strangely silent. Perhaps they're just being "sensitive,'' too.
And perhaps the British foreign secretary also admires the "sensitivity" of those Dutch public figures who once spoke out against the intimidatory aspects of Islam and have now opted for diplomatic silence and life under 24-hour armed guard. And maybe he even admires the "sensitivity" of the increasing numbers of Dutch people who dislike the pervasive fear and tension in certain parts of the Netherlands and so have emigrated to Canada and New Zealand.
Very few societies are genuinely multicultural. Most are bicultural: On the one hand, there are folks who are black, white, gay, straight, pre-op transsexual, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, worshippers of global-warming doom-mongers, and they rub along as best they can. And on the other hand are folks who do not accept the give-and-take, the rough-and-tumble of a "diverse" "tolerant" society, and, when one gently raises the matter of their intolerance, they threaten to kill you, which makes the question somewhat moot.
One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there's very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and Sharia. As a famously sensitive Dane once put it, "To be or not to be, that is the question."
© Mark Steyn, 2006
Posted by: Guest at the Feast | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 07:34 AM
Mr. Marshall and Wolfie,
You are overlooking, I think, the reason why the cartoons were commissioned and published: a Danish author could not find an illustrator willing to illustrate his book on Muhammad; this so alarmed the newspaper Jyllands Posten that it wanted to check whether or not Islamic norms and a large Muslim presence had curtailed freedom of speech in Denmark. Obviously, they never dreamed that the situation had gone beyond their worst nightmares.
What both of you are clearly not asking yourselves is the following: what your reaction would have been had the same newspaper been, say, publishing a photo of "Piss Christ" or the Brooklyn Museum's "Madonna of the Dung." I suppose you two were in the picket lines in front of the New York Times for having published photos of that "rabble-rousing smut"...
Whether or not you think those cartoons were in good taste or not, or hate-filled or not (incidentally, you seem quite unperturbed by the the truly vicious caricatures of Bush, Sharon, or anyone else unpopular with the Left in the European press- and these are incomparably more "rabble-rousing" than anything in those rather tame Danish cartoons), is irrelevant at this point: Jyllands Posten certainly confirmed its worst suspicions, and more.
Aren't you just a little bit perturbed that Muslims are burning down Danish embassies, threatening to kill Europeans and carry out terrorist attacks in reprisals for a set of cartoons (!!)? As I recall, the Left in America was far more offensive about the Christian Right after the 2004 elections- why was that a laudable, sacrosanct expression of free-speech, while the Muslim attempts to muzzle free speech in a society not their own is legitimate? Why, in short, has the Left become so expert at employing and purveying the double standard?
Better yet: why are you so unperturbed by Muslim caricatures depicting Christians and Jews as pigs and monkeys (on the basis of the Qur'an statement denoting them as such; see Michael Cook's "Ibn Qutayba and the Monkeys," Studia Islamica, 89 (1999)if you need a referenced discussion), bloodsuckers and depraved murderers, while drawings containing one miniscule fraction of the bile spewed forth daily in, say, the state-controlled press of Saudi Arabia or Gaza doesn't even merit a passing mention? It is perhaps the hypocrisy of the Muslim attitude, and their useful idiots in the West, that is the most brazen aspect of this whole tempest in a teacup.
Posted by: Guest at the Feast | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 07:09 AM
This whole debate has been crippling European intellectualism since the end of the second world war, and I suspect we will never get to the end of it because the only solution is :
1) Outlaw inequality.
2) Outlaw stupidity.
But its become resoundingly clear that both seem to be a natural feature of being human.
Nobody I know believes that these cartoons are even an attempt to examine freedom of expression, they are rabble-rousing smut.
Posted by: Wolfie | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 06:44 AM
The Cartoon War may very well prove to be the watershed event, likely of equally defining importance for the 21st Century as the 1914 assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo was for the 20th.
Give me a break, Baroness!
Diversity is a fact. None of the various religions, ethnic groups, and so on, are going to go anywhere else. So get used to it.
Now you or I don't have to like the values or the attitudes of each other or of anybody else. But the world we live in is now like traveling the subway, or hanging out in a crowded bar. You begin spitting in somebody's face, you're likely to start a brawl. And the brawl might even have a tragic end, but it will not go on forever.
There is no "dilemma" of multiculturalism, particularly. Nobody has to tolerate the threat of violence, ever. And nobody that I know of, liberal or not, has ever said they have to. As a wise judge once said, "Your right to swing your fist ended at his nose." The threat of violence has nothing to do with anybody's culture, particularly.
But, short of the threat of violence, a wise person does try to get along with their neighbors, whatever they may privately think of them. And even if they can't, they are better off not foaming at the mouth about it. Oscar Wilde put it perfectly, "A gentleman offends no one unintentionally."
If the people who drew and printed the cartoons thought they would cause no offense, they are fools. If they did know that they would cause offense, what did they expect? You go into a bar with an attitude problem, and you're probably going to get in a fight.
This so-called "clash of civilizations" is simply a bunch of people with too much time on their hands, and a life of relative personal safety and security, whipping themselves into a frenzy which helps none of us negotiate our way through the real dangers in a dangerous world.
A prudent person makes some preparation for genuine danger, perhaps even to the point of carrying weapons. But a prudent person, carrying weapons, also chooses their words carefully when in danger, and keeps their head.
Have you looked for yours lately?
Posted by: Joseph Marshall | Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 12:36 AM
u r 1000000% right. about all the impoortantr stuff. it's just... but.......
let's call this the cartoon intifada, not the cartoon war.
i feel tnat the term cartoon war enlarges this phase/this tactic of the enemy too much. (i wrote a post on how this intifada is ralted to many others. check it out...)
ya see i feel the war is WW4. all other phases are campaign if we start them and intifadas if they start them and if they formulate them to appear as if they are spontaneous mass movements instead of shrewdly planned attacks.
point in fact: as lgf pointed out: where inthe heck did all those muslims all come up with danish flags at the same time!?
like the paris intifada this all coordinated - internationally - by the ummah/axis of evil.
also: I LOVE YOU!
Posted by: reliapundit | Saturday, February 04, 2006 at 11:31 PM