Shameful appeasement
The past several days of mayhem throughout the Muslim world — all thanks to a handful of mild cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed — have provided a clarifying moment for those still uncertain about what the West faces from radical disciples of the Islamic faith.
What’s clear is that East and West are not just cultures apart, but centuries, and that certain elements of the Muslim world would like to drag us back into the Dark Ages.
What is also clear is that the West’s own leaders, both in Europe and the USA, as well as many of our own journalists, have been weak-spined when it comes to defending the principles of free expression that the artists in Denmark were exploring.
Instead of stepping up to passionately defend freedoms won through centuries of bloody sacrifice, most have bowed to ayatollahs of sensitivity, rebuking the higher calling of enlightenment and sending the cartoonists into hiding under threat of death.
Many U.S. newspapers have declined to reproduce the cartoons out of respect for Muslims, setting up the absurd implication that an open airing of the debate’s content constitutes disrespect. Both the U.S. State Department and the Vatican have declared that Muslims were justified in being offended, while former president Bill Clinton, speaking in Qatar last month, called the cartoons “appalling.”
Read the whole column. I particularly like the following portions:
Thanks to this heritage of healthy irreverence, today self-deprecation and parody are favorite ingredients in the volatile, spicy stew we call freedom. That’s why we roast our most powerful in tribute — and why politicians collect, frame and display cartoons that lampoon them. The ability to laugh at oneself, or to shrug off insult, is a sign both of a mature ego and a mature society.
Unfortunately, much of the Arab/Muslim world enjoys no such legacy, much to its cultural impoverishment and to our potential peril. It might help us to win this war of ideas if we properly understand our own.
… and …
Two common apologist arguments beg rebuttal. One of them compares printing inflammatory cartoons to crying “fire” in a crowded theater, implying that one shouldn’t express things certain to offend others. Never mind that all political commentary would cease by such a standard, but the reason crying “fire” is forbidden is practical. People panic and stampede when they hear it, and it is false. It is imperative to cry “fire” when there really is a fire. It is also imperative to cry foul when cartoonists face death threats for doodling.
The other argument, also based on a logical fallacy, is that the Danish cartoons are comparable to racist caricatures of Jews in Nazi Germany and blacks in the segregationist South. The Boston Globe, which saw fit in the past to defend “Piss Christ” (a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass of urine) as well as a depiction of the Virgin Mary covered in feces as worthy of government subsidy, made such a case recently.
There are at least two reasons why The Globe’s comparison is bogus: gas chambers and lynchings. Both the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were officially sanctioned enforcers of immoral social orders that used caricature to further degrade and dehumanize beleaguered minorities they ultimately murdered.
There is no equivalence between organized murder on behalf of a malignant social system and a half-dozen nerdy artists, speaking only for themselves, lampooning a fanatical religious sect whose members, by the way, specifically advance the delightful goal of exterminating millions of “infidels.”
The correct comparison, in fact, for Nazi and Klan terrorists are their brothers under the hoods — the jihadists who issued a death sentence on writer Salman Rushdie, who beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl and businessman Nick Berg, and who kidnapped an innocent American female journalist and showed videos of her sobbing and terrified among armed men holding guns to her head.
A ‘dangerous moment’ for Europe and Islam
As Islamic protests grew against the publication in Europe of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, a small Arab movement active in Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark responded with a drawing on its Web site of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank. “Write this one in your diary, Anne,” Hitler was shown as saying.
The intent of the cartoon, the Arab European League said, was “to use our right to artistic expression” just as the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten did when it published a group of cartoons showing Muhammad last September. “Europe has its sacred cows, even if they’re not religious sacred cows,” said Dyab Abou Jahjah, the founder of the organization, which claims rights for immigrants aggressively but without violence.
Such contrasts have produced a worrisome sense that the conflict over the cartoons has pushed both sides across an unexpected threshold, where they view each other with miscomprehension and suspicion.
“This feels to me like a defining moment,” said Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford professor of European history. “It is a crunch time for Europe and Islam,” he said, “it is an extremely dangerous moment,” one that could lead to “a downward spiral of mutual perceptions, and not just between extremists.”
U.S. says Iran and Syria stoking cartoon protests
America entered the row over the Muhammad cartoons yesterday accusing Syria and Iran of stoking up protests against the caricatures to suit their own ends. In France, the publication of all the offending cartoons by a magazine sparked further protests.
Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, said: “I have no doubt that Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and have used this for their own purposes. The world ought to call them on it.”
Meanwhile, as all this plays out over a dozen, generally tame cartoons, some of which showed more the cartoonist’s fear of Moslems than an image of Mohammed, realize that today’s tremors are, at least in part, driven by lies and fakes (hat tip to Gateway Pundit).
Also remember that, while the entire brouhaha is supposedly based upon the employment of images of the prophet Mohammed, such images are certainly nothing new. No, there are other motivations at play here, and they may be a case of radical Islamists showing their hand too early.