from the Telegraph. He makes some good points about the way in which the extremists have had to manipulate things to create outrage. The Islamic world has some inner contradictions and splits that are at work here.
It's some time since I visited Palestine, so I may be out of date, but I don't remember seeing many Danish flags on sale there. Not much demand, I suppose. I raise the question because, as soon as the row about the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten broke, angry Muslims popped up in Gaza City, and many other places, well supplied with Danish flags ready to burn. (In doing so, by the way, they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but let that pass.)
Why were those Danish flags to hand? Who built up the stockpile so that they could be quickly dragged out right across the Muslim world and burnt where television cameras would come and look? The more you study this story of "spontaneous" Muslim rage, the odder it seems.
The complained-of cartoons first appeared in October; they have provoked such fury only now. As reported in this newspaper yesterday, it turns out that a group of Danish imams circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries. When they did so, they included in their package three other, much more offensive cartoons which had not appeared in Jyllands-Posten but were lumped together so that many thought they had.
It rather looks as if the anger with which all Muslims are said to be burning needed some pretty determined stoking.
Peter Mandelson, who seems to think that his job as European Trade Commissioner entitles him to pronounce on matters of faith and morals, accuses the papers that republished the cartoons of "adding fuel to the flames"; but those flames were lit (literally, as well as figuratively) by well-organised, radical Muslims who wanted other Muslims to get furious. How this network has operated would make a cracking piece of investigative journalism.
Now the BBC announces that the head of the International Association of Muslim Scholars has called for an "international day of anger" about the cartoons. It did not name this scholar, or tell us who he is. He is Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. According to Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, Qaradawi is like Pope John XXIII for Catholics, "the most progressive force for change" in the Muslim world.
Yet if you look up Qaradawi's pronouncements, you find that he sympathises with the judicial killing of homosexuals, and wants the rejection of dialogue with Jews in favour of "the sword and the rifle". He is very keen on suicide bombing, especially if the people who blow themselves up are children - "we have the children bomb". This is a man for whom a single "day of anger" is surely little different from the other 364 days of the year.
Which leads me to question the extreme tenderness with which so many governments and media outlets in the West treat these outbursts of outrage. It is assumed that Muslims have a common, almost always bristling, view about their faith, which must be respected. Of course it is right that people's deeply held beliefs should be treated courteously, but it is a great mistake - made out of ignorance - to assume that those who shout the loudest are the most representative.
a mistake they want us to make
This was the error in the case in Luton, where a schoolgirl's desire to wear the jilbab was upheld in the erroneous belief that this is what Islam demands. In fact, the girl was backed by an extremist group, and most of the other Muslims at the school showed no inclination to dress in full-length gowns like her. It's as if the Muslim world decided that the views of the Rev Ian Paisley represented the whole of authentic Christianity.
There is no reason to doubt that Muslims worry very much about depictions of Mohammed. Like many, chiefly Protestant, Christians, they fear idolatry. But, as I write, I have beside me a learned book about Islamic art and architecture which shows numerous Muslim paintings from Turkey, Persia, Arabia and so on. These depict the Prophet preaching, having visions, being fed by his wet nurse, going on his Night-Journey to heaven, etc.
The truth is that in Islam, as in Christianity, not everyone agrees about what is permissible.
Some of these depictions are in Western museums. What will the authorities do if the puritan factions within Islam start calling for them to be removed from display (this call has been made, by the way, about a medieval Christian depiction of the Prophet in Bologna)? Will their feeling of "offence" outweigh the rights of everyone else?
Obviously, in the case of the Danish pictures, there was no danger of idolatry, since the pictures were unflattering. The problem, rather, was insult. But I am a bit confused about why someone like Qaradawi thinks it is insulting to show the Prophet's turban turned into a bomb, as one of the cartoons does. He never stops telling us that Islam commands its followers to blow other people up.
If we take fright whenever extreme Muslims complain, we put more power in their hands. If the Religious Hatred Bill had passed unamended this week, it would have been an open invitation to any Muslim who likes getting angry to try to back his anger with the force of law. Even in its emasculated state, the Bill will still encourage him, thus stirring the ill-feeling its authors say they want to suppress.
On the Today programme yesterday, Stewart Lee, author of Jerry Springer: The Opera - in which Jesus appears wearing nappies - let the cat out of the bag. He suggested that it was fine to offend Christians because they had themselves degraded their iconography; Islam, however, has always been more "conscientious about protecting the brand".
The implication of the remark is fascinating. It is that the only people whose feelings artists, newspapers and so on should consider are those who protest violently. The fact that Christians nowadays do not threaten to blow up art galleries, invade television studios or kill writers and producers does not mean that their tolerance is rewarded by politeness. It means that they are insulted the more.
Right now, at the fashionable White Cube Gallery in Hoxton, you can see the latest work of Gilbert and George, mainly devoted, it is reported, to attacks on the Catholic Church. The show is called Sonofagod Pictures and it features the head of Christ on the Cross replaced with that of a primitive deity. One picture includes the slogan "God loves F***ing".
Like most Christians, I find this offensive, but I think I must live with the offence in the interests of freedom. If I find, however, that people who threaten violence do have the power to suppress what they dislike, why should I bother to defend freedom any more? Why shouldn't I ring up the Hon Jay Jopling, the proprietor, and tell him that I shall burn down the White Cube Gallery unless he tears Gilbert and George off the walls? I won't, I promise, but how much longer before some Christians do? The Islamist example shows that it works.
There is a great deal of talk about responsible journalism, gratuitous offence, multicultural sensitivities and so on. Jack Straw gibbers about the irresponsibility of the cartoons, but says nothing against the Muslims threatening death in response to them. I wish someone would mention the word that dominates Western culture in the face of militant Islam - fear. And then I wish someone would face it down.
I shall be writing tomorrow specifically on the blasphemy business: the very different way in which some cartoons about the Prophet Mohammad, which first appeared in an obscure Danish newspaper, have been received, East and West. As the result of a bold but isolated publishing decision by the editors of Jyllands-Posten, no Danish national, and perhaps no European, is now safe in a Muslim country; and Danish and other products have ceased to be sold.
As I write, the temperature is still rising. I notice Muslim demonstrations are still mostly in the planning stage, across Europe. In light of the recent French rioting, and the timid French response, I fear this may get out of hand. In the Arab world, protests are still confined to the usual suspects -- the several thousand who will always come out to provide a fresh Muslim anger segment for the international media. The violence in Gaza is also within the usual range, though the explicit targeting of the European Union offices portends something new. But we have yet to see how all this builds. My gut feeling -- albeit at a distance -- is that the fire this time is greater than previous apoplectic responses to e.g. the Satanic Verses, the Abu Ghraib prison photos, or the Newsweek reports from Guantanamo.
Not that the provocation is greater. What we have instead is a wave that is building from lesser waves. Each new provocation, each new breakthrough event, such as the 9/11 hit, or the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections, adds to the height of what is actually becoming a single wave.
What should be apparent to every Western observer by now, is the ability of this wave, served by modern technology, including world television and Internet, to wash over national and regional boundaries in the Muslim world. Those boundaries were drawn by European Imperialists in the last two centuries, and have served as bulkheads or firewalls against just this sort of catastrophe. They were partly meant for that purpose, by a Europe that was once more vividly aware of the power an aroused Islam could exert -- on a once-Christian continent entirely surrounded by Islamic empires or sea, that several times came close to being completely overrun.
It has become a cliché, or if it has not it should have, that Europe forgets, but Islam remembers. The popularity, and resonance, in the Arab world, of declarations from various Islamists, about recovering Andalusia and fighting the Crusaders, is not something we can dismiss as quaint. And those who have lost their religious convictions, are poorly placed to judge the power of religion over the power of nation or place. The European invention of nationalism was, to a large extent, a project to create bulwarks or firewalls within Europe itself, against the spread of what we had seen in the Thirty Years War. One might almost say it succeeded too well in taming religious fervour -- so that now Europe is defenceless against any fervour from outside.
So much more to say on this, but let me cut to the chase. While I think President Bushs doctrine of spreading democracy in the Middle East was worthy and intelligent, and while I think we must not give up on it, the doctrine remains inchoate. We have not yet answered the, And then what?
Our enemy -- fanatical Islam -- has shown itself adaptable to Western military tactics. For instance, the development of a new species of booby-traps, or IEDs in Iraq, as a low-cost way of randomly killing Iraqis and Americans alike, and thus sabotaging Iraqs recovery, is a clever development from the too-costly methods of car bombs and suicide-martyrs. As the Pentagon keeps explaining, it is a mistake to think the other side is incapable of adjusting its tactics, as we adjust ours.
That enemy is now adapting to the tactic of democracy. Even in Iraq, he takes up the challenge, to win elections instead of merely sabotaging them. And he sees a huge possibility in this: to link together disparate national Islamist movements into a pan-Islamic popular front -- that may itself eventually overwhelm the bulwarks and firewalls of European Imperialism. Like multiple hijacked airliners, a modern Western device can be put at the service of an ancient Islamic cause.
The wave of which I spoke above may prove indistinguishable from this wave. What I fear may hit us in due course might be awkwardly called, the new democratic pan-Islamism".
Posted by: Steve White ||
02/05/2006 00:00 ||
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#1
... no Danish national, and perhaps no European, is now safe in a Muslim country
#2
Talk about "breakthrough events". Take the psychopathic "tip of the spear" - Iran - and give then nuclear weapons. Your "wave" will be a "mother of all tsunamis".
I can connect the dots - from Munich '72, to Tehran '79 - and through all the outrages and atrocities since - and you better believe that I see a growing wave of destruction rising up over the civilized world as I think of it.
It is time to put political correctness aside, to stop trying to be fair and tolerant, and respectful, and to simply start stomping on all the visible and vocal cockroaches - deport them, imprison them - make then assimilate, or leave non-Islamic lands.
World governments in 2006 act so absurdly naiive - I can only imagine what the surviving western governments of 2030 will be saying, looking back on this decade.
"What were they THINKING back then, to have allowed what was then a weak background pestilence to have grown into this murderous plague that we face today?"
#3
DW downplays the capacity of the western world to smite Islam on the street and in the mosque. You wanna have Grandpa out yelling with his green turban and dull sword? Prepare for a willy-pete cremation. Bring the fireplace-tools shovel. Islam has no clue what they are asking for
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/05/2006 1:30 Comments ||
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#4
Aye, Frank, and they don't seem to care so fry 'em.
Posted by: DanNY ||
02/05/2006 2:09 Comments ||
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#5
I hope this does continue to build and build. The issue is ridiculous and most people will see it as such. Politicians who pander to this nonsense like Jack Straw will get thrown out of office and the absurdity of multiculturalism as a feel good veneer over a self-enforced apartheid will become obvious.
#8
This is all about clarity. The muslims who are, in the words of Jimmy Cliff "hootin and a shootin and rootin and a lootin, lord your too bad", are giving the west a gift. I just visited a blog in the SF Chronicle and most of the posts there, except for a couple posted by muslims, were adamantly against muslim actions. This is in San Francisco! If the moon bats (aka folk marxists) come around to see that the muli-culti approach is crap with these people, then the muslims are really in for it.
Hopefully, the sane among them will rise up and shut this idiotic shit down. I am not holding my breath as that segment of the population has neither the guns nor the money to make a difference.
#10
This is a manufactured furfy from the radical Islamists.
Clearly they are in need of more funding and more members.
These cartoons were printed last October.
Why did it take so long for the outrage? Why did all the outrage break out in one week? Who gave them all Danish flags to burn? Who gave them money for protest signs? Who organised them?
This was planned.
They could have seized on anything, there are other cartoons of mohammed about. Like the Jesus and Mo' strip, or Mohammed in the Super Best Friends episode of South Park.
Poor old Denmark was just the patsy this time.
Some radical Islamists want a whole lot of Muslims to seethe and get a whole lot more angry.
Coupled with the Bin Laden tapes coming out in the last month it points I think to a major terror attack looming.
Qaida could be trying to head off any sympathy for Western victims in the Muslim world to maximise culture war points after their next hit. It's gonna be a big one.
From the Boston Globe. No cartoons, but it does say what some of them were about.
HINDUS CONSIDER it sacrilegious to eat meat from cows, so when a Danish supermarket ran a sale on beef and veal last fall, Hindus everywhere reacted with outrage. India recalled its ambassador to Copenhagen, and Danish flags were burned in Calcutta, Bombay, and Delhi. A Hindu mob in Sri Lanka severely beat two employees of a Danish-owned firm, and demonstrators in Nepal chanted: ''War on Denmark! Death to Denmark!"In many places, shops selling Dansk china or Lego toys were attacked by rioters, and two Danish embassies were firebombed.
It didn't happen, of course. Hindus may consider it odious to use cows as food, but they do not resort to boycotts, threats, and violence when non-Hindus eat hamburger or steak. They do not demand that everyone abide by the strictures of Hinduism and avoid words and deeds that Hindus might find upsetting. The same is true of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons: They don't lash out in violence when their religious sensibilities are offended. They certainly don't expect their beliefs to be immune from criticism, mockery, or dissent.
But radical Muslims do.
The current uproar over cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper illustrates yet again the fascist intolerance that is at the heart of radical Islam. Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's largest daily, commissioned the cartoons to make a point about freedom of speech. It was protesting the climate of intimidation that had made it impossible for a Danish author to find an illustrator for his children's book about Mohammed. No artist would agree to illustrate the book for fear of being harmed by Muslim extremists. Appalled by this self-censorship, Jyllands-Posten invited Danish artists to submit drawings of Mohammed, and published the 12 it received.
Most of the pictures are tame to the point of dullness, especially compared to the biting editorial cartoons that routinely appear in US and European newspapers. A few of them link Mohammed to Islamist terrorism -- one depicts him with a bomb in his turban, while a second shows him in Heaven, pleading with newly arrived suicide terrorists: ''Stop, stop! We have run out of virgins!" Others focus on the threat to free speech: In one, a sweating artist sits at his drawing board, nervously sketching Mohammed, while glancing over his shoulder to make sure he's not being watched.
That anything so mild could trigger a reaction so crazed -- riots, death threats, kidnappings, flag-burnings -- speaks volumes about the chasm that separates the values of the civilized world from those in too much of the Islamic world. Freedom of the press, the marketplace of ideas, the right to skewer sacred cows: Militant Islam knows none of this. And if the jihadis get their way, it will be swept aside everywhere by the censorship and intolerance of sharia.
Here and there, some brave Muslim voices have cried out against the book-burners. The Jordanian newspaper Shihan published three of the cartoons. ''Muslims of the world, be reasonable," implored Shihan's editor, Jihad al-Momani, in an editorial. ''What brings more prejudice against Islam -- these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras?" But within hours Momani was out of a job, fired by the paper's owners after the Jordanian government threatened legal action.
He wasn't the only editor sacked last week. In Paris, Jacques LeFranc of the daily France Soir was also fired after running the Mohammed cartoons. The paper's owner, an Egyptian Copt named Raymond Lakah, issued a craven and Orwellian statement offering LeFranc's head as a gesture of ''respect for the intimate beliefs and convictions of every individual." But the France Soir staff defended their decision to publish the drawings in a stalwart editorial. ''The best way to fight against censorship is to prevent censorship from happening," they wrote. ''A fundamental principle guaranteeing democracy and secular society is under threat. To say nothing is to retreat."
Across the continent, nearly two dozen other newspapers have joined in defending that principle. While Islamist clerics proclaim an ''international day of anger" or declare that ''the war has begun," leading publications in Norway, France, Italy, Spain, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have reprinted the Danish cartoons. But there has been no comparable show of backbone in America, where (as of Friday) only the New York Sun has had the fortitude to the run some of the drawings.
Make no mistake: This story is not going away, and neither is the Islamofascist threat. The freedom of speech we take for granted is under attack, and it will vanish if it is not bravely defended. Today the censors may be coming for some unfunny Mohammed cartoons, but tomorrow it is your words and ideas they will silence. Like it or not, we are all Danes now.
#1
Canadian press has chosen to ignore the whole thing - like it has nothing to do with us.
violence continues to spread in ME over this. And it won't stop. Saudi Arabia meia are kissing themselves over what they have wrought.
What a wonderful implosion and unveiling! Keep it up. We're only quiet while we contemplate the diificulty and horror of what we are going to have to do. Didn't want to. Gave every chance. Muslims truly have no idea of the hell they are unleashing against themselves.
#2
IOW, once the Germans go, there's only the Royal Navy and Brits to refight the Battle of Lepanto. Undoubtedly the Frenchies as heirs to Charles Martel will be insulted becuz the Spetzies are making any Muslim-specific invasion/takeover of France a given already, long before any such invasion occurs.
#3
Dare the Royal Navy insult Islam by sinking MadAhmed and his Navy of Mad Mad MAD M-A-D-D-D CAMEL-KAZIES. * Churchill - "No matter what happens, and no matter the costs in men and ships, you must SINK THE BISMARCK - eerrr, meant CAMELS".
#4
I am amazed this was published in the Boston Globe, of all places. The rhetoric used is an urbane version of what you can find on Rantburg every day.
IRAN may not be hell-bent on building a bomb just yet, but the International Atomic Energy Agency has ample evidence the country is working on a nuclear weapons program. And in the style of Saddam Hussein and the North Koreans, every time the Iranians are caught out lying about their aspirations to acquire weapons of mass destruction, they adopt tones of injured outrage, calling everybody else aggressors. And like those two dictatorships, the Iranians have relied on diplomatic delays and divisions among their opponents to acquire more time to work on their weapons capacity. With a bit of luck, the days when this strategy worked may be over. At an IAEA meeting at the weekend, China and Russia agreed with the US and the major European powers, plus 30 or so other countries, to refer Iran's nuclear program to the UN Security Council. While this will only occur after March, when an IAEA report on Iranian aspirations to develop WMD is due, all five Security Council members with veto power have signalled they are unhappy with Iran. While a lot can happen before the Security Council finally addresses the issue, the Iranians know now that they cannot rely on the diplomatic divisions and duckshoving that stopped the world uniting against Saddam. This is very good news. Despite the shambolic talking shop the UN General Assembly has become, a united Security Council is a voice not easily ignored.
The bad news is that Iran may be prepared to do exactly that. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regularly makes it clear he does not care what anybody thinks of him. In domestic politics he alienates the clerical establishment, which shares his religious zeal, with his talk of redistributing the country's oil wealth. And he goes out of his way to advance the most outrageous arguments imaginable. Mr Ahmadinejad says the Holocaust did not happen and talks of the destruction of Israel. And January he said he would ignore UN orders to abandon Iran's nuclear aspirations. This man, and the regime that allowed him to come to power -- the clerics veto election candidates they do not approve of -- are in the same league as North Korea. The peace of the world dictates that they cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons.
But stopping Mr Ahmadinejad will be a great deal more difficult than dealing with other aspiring warlords. North Korea is bankrupt and constantly close to starvation. Many among the Iraqi people are now angry with the US, but few of them were prepared to fight for their former dictator. In contrast, Mr Ahmadinejad's country is rich in oil, which the West needs as much as Iran needs the income it earns from energy exports. Sanctions may simply be too hard. Surgical military strikes to knock out Iran's nuclear facilities are equally unappealing. The Iranians do not have all their assets in one convenient location, having learned from the way Israel destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear program in one air raid in 1981. Certainly, the Israelis might well still attack if they believed that a man who argues for their obliteration was close to acquiring a nuclear weapon. But bombing Iran would unite tens of millions of Muslims in support of Mr Ahmadinejad and perhaps bring the region to war. Yet the strength of Mr Ahmadinejad's position depends on his being prepared to make Iran a pariah by defying the Security Council. And while the Iranian President may be willing to do this, his many political opponents at home would use it against him. For all his tough talk, it is a fair bet that Mr Ahmadinejad is now considering how he can avoid Security Council censure. There is still time for talks between Iran and the IAEA to reduce the risk of a confrontation. But the world cannot afford anything other than a united front against Iran.
#1
"Mr." Ahmadinejad can avoid a Security Council censure with a single veto, should be a piece of cake. If Iran isn't an international pariah by now, it never will be. There is no "world community", and the only ones standing firm are the Islamic Nazis. To end on an optimistic note, my cup of coffee is pretty good, and Wolfman Jack is still funny.
Posted by: DanNY ||
02/05/2006 02:30 ||
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Heavy duty moonbattery that completely misses the point. The Iranian nuclear program could be stopped by a half dozen cruise missiles a week (indefinitely) taking out appropriate electrical infrastructure.
#2
Sheesh. This clown isn't so much a moonbat, as he is an ordinary, garden-variety bullshit artist. To anyone with a knowledge of nuclear weaponry (i.e., who can use Google to search on the phrase "nuclear weapons"), this article is a comedy of ignorance and superstition.
Feh.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
02/05/2006 8:22 Comments ||
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Mister D. This clown isn't so much a moonbat, as he is an ordinary, garden-variety bullshit artist.
That's the art and essence of being a front-rank lib-lab.
#5
Do you think we would hear a peep out of Chavez if we nuked Iran? What about Kimmie, ours are tested and proven to work, he's never had a test of his. Personally, I think it is a marvelous idea, it would set the record straight with a number of uppity people the world over.
#6
I take your meaning, HU2592, but I've got to say that I don't take the idea of using nuclear weapons as ... casually ... as you and others seem to do.
It's not that I'm antiwar. My husband was a career officer in the Air Force during the cold war, I had close relatives in the missile silos and others who were pilots.
But the use of our nuclear arsenal should be a last resort, as the firebombings of Dresden were -- something which is a bad thing. It may come to the point where it's the least evil of many bad choices, but it will never be better than that.
That's my opinion, any way, and the opinion of those close to me who were prepared to execute the order to deploy them.
#7
And I should add that, moral issues aside, the practical side effects of anything other than very tactical nukes will be substantial: economically, politically, environmentally.
For us, for Iraq and Afghanistan, for a good part of the world. I don't look forward to the impact on the world economy, for instance, of radioactive sites all over one of the major oil producers.
It may come to that, but I doubt it -- and I hope not.
Posted by: DanNY ||
02/05/2006 02:19 ||
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This guy can't be serious. His "plan" for what we "must do" about Iran reminds me of the Far Side cartoon where the professor filled in the gap in his elaborate equation with the words "a miracle happens here".
#2
"The US would have to offer clear security guarantees to Iran that it will not attack: Tehran needs to be able to overcome its clear strategic justification for a nuclear deterrent."
Geez. What flavor KoolAid has this guy been drinking: Goofy Grape, Mean Green Meme, or maybe Electric?
#3
Making their water electric would have positive effects on their sanity. I think I could dig up a rec
ipe or five. Maybe even some hints on the simple cheap clorox one.
#4
I have a quicker and more reliable alternative to this mook's plan. And the best thing about it is that the muslims will be able to understand it, every nuance of it. It's called raw naked power, deafening unrelenting undeniable force. That is the only thing they can seem to understand. They mistake anything less as weakness.
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."
#1
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.
Posted by: Bobby ||
02/05/2006 10:50 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Remember the Koran flushing riots? This is the same shit all over again. When are they going to get it through their turbans, we don't care if they like it or not. This is not wackistan, Denmark is not wakistan, nobody cares!
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