It is 10 years since Tony Blair told me, in an interview for The Sunday Telegraph, of his fascination with Pontius Pilate. In an exploration of his personal beliefs, the Labour leader explained that he viewed Pilate "as the archetypal politician, caught on the horns of an age-old political dilemma... It is not always clear, even in retrospect, what is, in truth, right. Should we do what appears principled or what is politically expedient?" Well, indeed.
How resonant those words have seemed in the past few days, as Mr Blair's ministers and spokesmen have trimmed and mumbled over the cartoons controversy, passing the buck to the police and prosecuting authorities, shirking the statesmanship that was so desperately required. Listen, and you can still hear the sound of hands being washed: this is a government on auto-Pilate.
The tone was set on Friday by Jack Straw, who condemned the republication of the cartoons of Mohammed, but not the protests that had started the night before, at which outrageously violent slogans were brandished on placards by militant Muslims. At the weekend, it became clear that ministers would have to say more. But neither Mr Straw nor Peter Hain would endorse David Davis's call for arrests. Mr Hain sounded as if he was breaking up a playground row: "There has to be a bit of give and take. So let's cool it and work together in the interests of peace and stability around the world." That's telling them, Peter.
In the Commons on Monday, Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, said that "these are operational matters for the police to consider" - but also claimed that "the incident illustrates the merits of having all the legislation on the statute book, which includes the offences created by the Terrorism Bill, including the proposed new offences of encouragement and glorification of terrorism, which I hope will now have the support of the whole House."
So which is it to be, Home Secretary? Were the police right not to make arrests? Or did they lack the necessary powers? The confusion was compounded yesterday by the conviction of the radical cleric Abu Hamza. That verdict was entirely welcome. But if it was right to convict Hamza for inciting murder, why were those calling for beheadings and terrorist acts not arrested?
Yesterday, Mr Blair finally promised that "political correctness" would not "prevent the police from taking whatever action they think is necessary". But it is not political correctness that lies behind the ministerial blether and evasion: it is electoral statistics. Much has been made of the large number of Muslim voters in Mr Straw's Blackburn constituency, where his party's vote in last year's general election was down by 12.1 per cent and the performance of the anti-war Lib Dems up by 12.5 per cent. Blackburn was merely a vivid example of a national trend that terrified Labour pollsters.
In seats where between five and 10 per cent of voters are Muslims, Labour's vote fell by 8.1 per cent. In constituencies where more than 10 per cent are Muslims, the drop was 10.6 per cent. Overwhelmingly, Liberal Democrats were the beneficiaries.
With less than three months to go until local elections, Labour strategists are desperate to make up some of this lost ground, not least because the third party is in such disarray. They are gleeful about the Lib Dems' collusion in the watering down of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill - a tactic which will be presented to Muslim voters as an act of appalling treachery. Now, as flames engulf embassies and British Islamists call for their enemies to be slaughtered, ministers are taking no chances. Nothing must be done to alienate the Muslim vote.
Which leaves the rest of us to resolve such trivial matters as the future of free speech, the prospects for pluralism and the repeated collision of liberal democracy with modern Islamic fundamentalism. After 9/11, Madrid, and July 7 - to name but three horrors - it is no longer possible to shelve such issues as philosophical abstractions. The stakes could hardly be higher; the cost of failure unthinkable.
In the thick of the Rushdie affair, Carlos Fuentes warned of a terrible approaching conflict between "essential activities of the human spirit" - debate, humour, art - and a creed in which "reality is dogmatically defined once and for all in a sacred text... a sacred text is, by definition, a completed and exclusive text, You can add nothing to it. It does not converse with anyone. It is its own loudspeaker."
The conflict is not only between people, but within them.
Yesterday, Omar Khayam, the 22-year-old from Bedford who imitated a suicide bomber in protest at the cartoons, was returned to prison for breaching the terms of his parole licence. How is it possible to be both a convicted drug dealer - the very personification of the sinful West - but also a passionate Islamist? The answer is that it is not. But Khayam's behaviour symbolises the lethal tension between integration and radicalisation that exists within many Muslim males of his generation: a life oscillating between freedom and certainty, Western temptations and imported jihad.
The allure of Islamism to such people owes much to its confidence. And that confidence has been bolstered during the past week. On Monday's Newsnight, Anjem Choudary of al-Ghuraba - the group that organised Friday's rally - showed in a series of furious outbursts how empowered extremists feel by the impunity they have enjoyed. In response to Jeremy Paxman's point that he might be happier in a country where sharia law was in place, Mr Choudary raged: "Who said to you that you own Britain, anyway? Britain belongs to Allah." And just to make clear what he thinks of the British, he continued: "If I go to the jungle, I am not going to live like the animals. I'm going to propagate what I believe to be a superior way of life."
At such moments, the nation needs Paxman, and he did not disappoint. "We're moving on, matey," was his verdict on Mr Choudary's nonsense - and the right one, too. It lifted the spirits, as did the fine contribution by Sayeeda Warsi, the Conservative vice-chairman, and a British-born Muslim of Pakistani background.
Unfazed by Mr Choudary's offensive claim that she was not entitled to speak because she was not wearing a veil, Ms Warsi spoke up for the very British determination not to fall for the frothing of the reactionary Right (we are all doomed) or to yield to the threats of Muslim extremists (you are all doomed). "I am confident," she said, "that in Britain the middle ground, the people who are prepared to engage in dialogue and live alongside each other with shared values and a sense of shared identity, that they will prevail." Firebrands like Mr Choudary, she said, had no place in multi-cultural Britain.
It takes a lot of courage for a Muslim woman to say such a thing. Ms Warsi's intervention made the anodyne remarks of white male ministers seem all the more cowardly. Every politician, as Mr Blair observed a decade ago, resembles Pilate. But not all of them, when the moment of decision arrives, choose to wash their hands.
#3
How is it possible to be both a convicted drug dealer - the very personification of the sinful West - but also a passionate Islamist? The answer is that it is not.
Bullshit.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
02/10/2006 12:49 Comments ||
Top||
"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." -- Arnold Toynbee
As Danish embassies and European Union offices smolder in Beirut, Damascus, Gaza and Tehran -- the result of a junior varsity jihad -- the time could not be more apt for Bruce Bawer's "While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within," due out at the end of this month. Bawer is a gay American with a flair for languages who moved to Europe in 1999 to escape what he perceived to be the narrow-mindedness of the Christian right in America.
The move changed him. It also afforded a front row seat at the clash of civilizations now flaring into flames. If American Christian conservatives seemed intolerant to Bawer, they were cream puffs in comparison with the Islamofascists who are multiplying in Europe. Theo van Gogh produced a film about the mistreatment of women in the Islamic community and was assassinated by an unrepentant Islamist who defiantly told the dead man's mother, "I cannot feel for you because I believe you are an infidel." A rumor swept the Muslim world that American soldiers in Guantanamo flushed the Koran down a toilet, and violence erupted worldwide. European newspapers published cartoons insulting to Mohammad, and death threats poured in, embassies were set ablaze, and red-faced Muslims now vow jihad throughout the world.
The Muslim world clearly is not composed solely of murderous fanatics -- but only the most self-deluded would deny that the umma is under the sway of its most radical, medieval and intolerant members. It is they who have the wind at their backs at this moment of history. Forty percent of Britain's Muslims hold a favorable view of Osama bin Laden. Hopeful Westerners continue to call for moderate Muslims to speak up. But, as Bawer asks, "[W]here were the moderate Muslims? British Muslims seemed sincerely to deplore the London attacks. But though hundreds of thousands of them had marched in protest against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, 7/7 occasioned no sizable Muslim protest demonstration against Islamic terror . . . if that silent majority existed at all, it had to be one of the most silent majorities ever. It had remained silent after 9/11, Madrid, Beslan, and van Gogh's murder."
Europe is a beacon for Arab and Muslim immigrants, who flock to the freedom, comfort and convenience available in Western nations. There is no corresponding emigration from Europe to the Islamic world. Immigrants seek a better life, which is abundantly available, particularly in light of Europe's generous welfare benefits. But Europe does not assimilate its Muslim immigrants and does not wish to. Norway refers to its Muslim population as the "colorful community" and prides itself on keeping its "colorful" members separate from mainstream Norwegian society (in the name of multiculturalism, of course). But if a Muslim were to attempt to become an ordinary Norwegian (or Swede or Swiss or Frenchman), he would be met with rigid resistance. Multicultural cant thus covers a multitude of ethnocentric sins.
Many Muslim immigrants, Bawer argues, resist absorption as well, regarding Western society as fundamentally corrupt and unworthy. They want to live in Europe and reap the benefit of the civilization Christianity, rationalism and enlightenment have created -- but they despise it and hope to destroy it.
Into this boiling cauldron (recall the October 2005 riots in France) insert demography. Muslim families have multiple children, and European families are failing to have babies at even replacement levels. Historian Bernard Lewis has predicted that Europe will be majority Muslim by the end of this century "at the very latest." In Stockholm, Muslim teenagers can be seen wearing a T-shirt that says "2030 -- then we take over."
The heart of Bawer's book is not to replow familiar demographic ground, but to probe the political, moral and psychological aspects of Europe's response to this existential threat. The depressing answer, all too often, is that they capitulate. Bawer recounts how Amsterdam police, responding to a complaint by Muslims, dismantled a street mural erected on the site of van Gogh's murder that said "Thou Shalt Not Kill." Some leftist academics in Norway have suggested establishing sharia courts for Muslim citizens. Britain's Channel 4 canceled a documentary about abuse of girls in the Muslim community because the police cautioned that it might "increase community tension."
That self-censorship was exactly what the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was attempting to expose with its cartoons. That impulse -- to assert the value of free speech despite threats and violence -- is the best evidence to surface in quite some time that there is some life spirit left in sagging old Europe.
Mona Charen is the author of Do-Gooders and Useful Idiots.
Andrew Everett noted that several statues around campus already serve
such a purpose and that Colonel Boyington had many of the qualities the
University of Washington hoped to produce in its students.
Jill Edwards said she didnt believe a member of the Marine Corps was
an example of the sort of person UW wanted to produce.
Ashley Miller commented that many monuments at UW already
commemorate rich white men.
Wow--do I feel sorry for Andrew for having to put up with f(*@&g moonbats like this.
Posted by: Dar ||
02/10/2006 18:13 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Pappy Boyington's real memorial is found in the Marine aviators of today, who are more than aware of their role model. Men whose admiration and respect would mean a lot more to Boyington than any number of college students.
The great wealth and leisure created by modern technology have confused some in the modern age into thinking that history is linear. We expect that each generation will inevitably improve upon the last, as if we, the blessed of the 21st century, would never chase out Anaxagoras or execute Socrates or allow others to do so in our modern polis.
Often such material and moral advancement proves true look at the status of brain surgery now and 100 years ago, or the notion of equality under the law in 1860 and in 2006.
But just as often civilization can regress. Indeed, it can be nearly lost in a generation, especially so now, with technology acting as an afterburner of sorts which warps the rate of change, both good and bad.
Who would have thought, after the Enlightenment and the advance of humanism, that a 20th-century Holocaust would redefine the 500-year-old Inquisition as minor in comparison?
Did we envision that, little more than 60 years after Dachau, a head-of-state would boast openly about wiping out the remaining Jews? Or did we ever believe in the time of the United Nations and religious tolerance that radical Muslims would still be seriously promising to undo the Reconquista of the 15th century?
Did any sane observer dream, in the era of UNESCO and sophisticated global cultural heritage preservation, that the primitive Taliban would blow up and destroy, with impunity, the iconic Buddhist statues chiseled into the sandstone cliffs of Bamiyan that had survived 1,700 years of war, earthquakes, conquests, and weather?
Surely those who damned the inadvertent laxity of the Americans in not stopping others from looting the Baghdad museum should have expressed far greater outrage at the far greater, and intentional, destruction inflicted by the Taliban. Unless, that is, the issue of artistic freedom and preservation was never really the principle after all, but only the realistic calculation that, while George Bush's immensely powerful military would not touch a finger of its loudest critic, a motley bunch of radical Islamic fascists might well blow someone up or lop off his head for a tasteless caricature in far off Denmark.
The latest Islamic outrage over the Danish cartoons represents an erosion in the very notion of Western tolerance. Years ago, the death sentence handed down to Salman Rushdie was the dead canary in the mine. It should have warned us that the Western idea of free and unbridled expression, so difficultly won, can be so easily lost.
While listening to the obfuscations of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw about the Danish cartoons, I thought that next he was going to call for a bowdlerization of Dante's Inferno, where Dante and Virgil in the eighth rung of Hell gaze on the mutilated specters of Mahomet and his son Ali, along with the other Sowers of Discord. I grew up reading the text with the gruesome illustrations of Gustave Doré. Can Straw now damn that artist's judgment as well, when the next imam threatens global jihad, more terrorism, an oil cut-off, or to make things worse for Anglo-American troops who are trying to bring democracy to Iraq?
Surely he can apologize that the cross of the Union Jack offends British Muslims? Or perhaps the memory of what Lord Kitchener did in 1898 to the tomb of the Great Mahdi needs contemporary atonement once one starts down the road of self-censorship, there is never an end to it.
Since Bill Clinton mentioned nothing about free speech and expression or the rights of a newspaper to be offensive and tasteless, but lectured only about cultural insensitivity and the responsibility of the media not to be mean to Muslims, why did he stop with the Danish cartoonists? Surely someone who has apologized for everyone from General Sherman to the Shah could have lamented the work of every Western artist, from Rodin to Dali, who has rendered the Prophet in a bad light.
Like the appeasement of the 1930s, we are in the great age now of ethical retrenchment. So much has been lost even since 1960; then the very idea that a Dutch cartoonist whose work had offended radical Muslims would be in hiding for fear of his life would have been dismissed as fanciful.
Insidiously, the censorship only accelerates. It is dressed up in multicultural gobbledygook about hurtfulness and insensitivity, when the real issue is whether we in the West are going to be blown up or beheaded if we dare come out and support the right of an artist or newspaper to be occasionally crass.
In the post-Osama bin Laden and suicide-belt world of our own, we shudder at these fanatical riots, convincing ourselves that perhaps the Salman Rushdies, Theo Van Goghs, and Danish cartoonists of the world had it coming. All the while, we think to ourselves about the fact thatwe do not threaten to kill Muslims when they promulgate daily streams of hate and racism in sermons and papers, and much less would we go about promising death to the creator of "Piss Christ" or the Da Vinci Code. How ironic that we now find politically-correct Westerners those who formerly claimed they would defend to the last the right of an Andres Serrano or Dan Brown to offend Christians turning on the far milder artists who rile Muslims. Y
The radical Islamists are our generation's book burners who search for secular Galileos and Newtons. They are the new Nazi censors who sniff out anything favorable to the Jews. These fundamentalists are akin to the Soviet commissars who once decreed all art must serve political struggle or else.
If we give in to these 8th-century clerics, shortly we will be living in an 8th century ourselves, where we may say, hear, and do nothing that might offend a fundamentalist Muslim and, to assuage our treachery to freedom and liberalism, we'll always be equipped with the new rationale of multiculturalism and cultural equivalence which so poorly cloaks our abject fear.
There are three final considerations. First, millions of brave reformers in the Muslim world are trying each day to create a tolerant culture and a consensual society. What those in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Egypt want from us is not appeasement that emboldens the radicals in their midst, but patient, careful, and firm explanations that freedom is precious and worth the struggle even though its use can sometimes bother us. Surely the lesson from Eastern Europe applies: the oppressed there did not appreciate the realpolitik and appeasement of many in the West, but most often preferred a stalwart Reagan to an equivocating Carter.
Second, we, not the Islamists, are secure; our dependency on oil has masked a greater reality: that the Muslim Middle East, as in the days of the Ottomans, is parasitic on the West for advancements of all sorts, from heart surgery to computers. Most of the hatred expressed over the cartoons was beamed on television, through the Internet, or communicated over cell phones that would not exist in Pakistan, Syria, or Iran without imported technology.
The Islamists are also sad bullies, who hunt out causes for offense in the most obscure places, but would recoil at the first sign of Western defiance. Turkey may say little to the Islamists now, but they would say lots if the European Union decided to pass on its inclusion into the union. Local imams sound fiery, but if the West is too debauched a place for any pure Muslim to endure, why then do they not lead, Moses-like, an exodus of the devout away from the rising flood of decadence, and back to the paradise of a purer Syria or Algeria?
Third, the bogus notion of multiculturalism has blinded us to a simple truth: we in the West can live according to our own values and should not allow those radicals who embrace or condone polygamy, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, political autocracy, homosexual persecution, honor killings, female circumcision, and a host of other unmentionables to threaten our citizens within our own countries.
The deluded here might believe that the divide is a moral one, between a supposedly decadent secular West and a pious Middle East, rather than an existential one that is fueled by envy, jealousy, self-pity, and victimization. But to believe the cartoons represent the genuine anguish of an aggrieved puritanical society tainted by Western decadence, one would have to ignore that Turkey is the global nexus for the sex-slave market, that Afghanistan is the world's opium farm, that the Saudi Royals have redefined casino junketeering, and that the repository of Hitlerian imagery is in the West Bank and Iran.
The entire controversy over the cartoons is ludicrous, but often in history the trivial and ludicrous can wake a people up before the significant and tragic follow.
#3
There have always been barbarians outside the gates... Our entrenched PCism is more likely to get us killed than any other factor. The greatest dangers come from within, thus we are our own worst enemy.
To unmuddle the view of the external dangers - so we can eliminate them, we need to remove the obfuscators, apologists, and enemies (declared or not / conscious or not) within.
Some might call it the axle of anti-American populism.
With linchpins in Tehran on one end and Caracas on the other, a new brand of international populism is rising by fanning flames of division between Western powers and the "powerless" of the developing world.
Leaders, from Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez, are winning points at home by striking a nationalist and anti-American pose. Their method: Use the international stage to rail against what they see as a disconnect between the values espoused by the world's sole superpower and its actions.
Mr. Ahmadinejad consolidates his domestic political power and wins support among several countries caught in America's cross hairs by pointing out that Washington accepts the nuclear status of Pakistan - which it needs on its side in the war on terror - while opposing Iran's program, which Iran insists is for power-generation only.
Mr. Chávez, espousing a philosophy of "democratic socialism" in any international forum that will listen, accuses the United States of trying to overthrow his own democratically elected government. He fires up sympathetic crowds by branding "US imperialism [as] our real enemy."
Yet for all their heated rhetoric, the two leaders have a vision for the world, one that seeks to end the "sole superpower" reality. Beyond simply opposing America's robust exercise of power - a sentiment increasingly found in the developing world, especially - their aim is to join political forces to provide a significant counterweight in the international arena.
"There is no great level of love between Venezuela and Iran, but they both are seeking a multipolar world, and that's where the two of them find a point of intersection," says Miguel Tinker-Salas, a Latin America and US foreign-policy expert at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.
The two leaders, though, are impelled by different motives. Chávez is motivated by an antiglobalization stance that vilifies Washington as the epicenter of market- oriented economics, says Thomas Carothers, an expert on democracy and rule of law at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Ahmadinejad's wrath, he says, is more focused on the Bush administration's agenda for secular democracy in the Middle East.
Russia's Vladimir Putin also belongs on the list, says Mr. Carothers, for his challenge to the West over its promotion of democracy in Russia and in the former Soviet neighboring countries.
"We're seeing on different fronts different leaders who are pushing back," he says, "with the idea of resisting the West." It is "no coincidence" that all three countries are "flush with oil money" that allows their leaders the luxury of promoting their causes, he adds.
A risk of overreaction by the West
The West's response to the populists' challenge need not - indeed, should not - be uniform, some analysts say. Each presents a different challenge.
"The Latin American populists like Chávez have a very limited capacity to do anything that threatens substantial harm to our interests, so it's key in those cases not to overreact," says Andrew Bacevich, director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University.
Iran, on the other hand, is different because of the "nuclear question" and "the importance we assign to stability in that region," he says. Iran plays a key role in events in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
In some current international controversies, it's the West, not simply America, that is in the line of fire - as with the Muslim world's fury over cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. But Chávez and Ahmadinejad, in particular, "are finding it pays politically to focus on the US," adds Mr. Tinker-Salas.
Iran lost no time this week announcing an end to cooperation on its nuclear program with the International Atomic Energy Agency, after the IAEA on Saturday approved a US-supported resolution that reports Iran to the United Nations Security Council.
Landing Iran in the Security Council was a goal of the Bush administration for at least two years. But the vote also revealed cracks in the international community and support for Iran - albeit from some at the top of Washington's blacklist. Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba all voted "no" on the IAEA resolution.
Iran's foreign minister will travel to Cuba and Venezuela this month in a bid to further cement support for Iran's battle against the "world oppressor" - the US. Ahmadinejad has established contact, too, with Evo Morales, the recently elected populist president of Bolivia.
Rumsfeld takes a jab
The US is also caught in what State Department officials describe as a "tit-for-tat" imbroglio with Chávez. After Caracas expelled a military attaché assigned to the US Embassy on charges of spying, the US responded last Friday by expelling a Venezuelan diplomat.
The US action followed comments by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in which he likened Chávez to Adolf Hitler, saying both were "elected legally." The election of "populist" leaders like Chávez and Bolivia's new president, he added, "are worrisome."
Some experts caution against such riffs, saying they only play into the hands of the new populists, coming at a time when US standing in the world is low and more people seem to sympathize with challenges to American power.
"People see a certain hypocrisy in US actions, and what we're seeing from people like Chávez and Iran's president are attempts to exploit that," says Tinker-Salas.
"The US has a pretty good record of falling into this trap," adds Mr. Bacevich of Boston University. "The Bush administration has so overused the Hitler analogy that it's almost demeaning to history."
Iran's depiction of an "arrogant West" has "some echo" in parts of the developing world, he adds, but that doesn't mean Damascus, Havana, and Caracas are poised to lead a new anti-West movement.
Still, anti-Western sentiment shows signs of spreading, fed by economics, nationalism, or culture, says Carothers. That should give the US pause from "sparring" with the new populists, he says, "as tempting as that might be."
The current circumstances should also encourage the US to reduce its use of all foreign oil, he adds.
"It takes ready cash to fiddle with politics outside your borders," he says, "and thanks to oil prices that's something that all of these leaders have."
#1
All the more reason to get our assess off of oil.
Toshiba has created a battery that will recharge up to 80% capacity in a few minutes. Scale that, take GM's hydrogen car skate-board idea and replace the hydrogen with big batteries. This is tech that is five years off. Screw hydrogen, this is better. Make them hybrids so they don't waste the whole battery getting up to speed and you can have bigger cars and something usable instead of the stupid dinky electrics we have now.
America loves big vehicles. Trucks and SUVs run all over the place. Start mixing biodiesel into the diesel mix. Lesson the hydrocarbins, clean the air, and get rid of the McDonalds' fry grease. This can be done now. In some warmer areas you could go with pure biodiesel and a small heater on the oil pan.
Biodiesel sucks for faster cars. We should mix more ethanol/methanol into the fuel system to cut down on our oil usage. This would help keep the current cars running with slightly less gas usage as we shift over to electric cars.
We need to bulk up the power grid to support the increased use of electricity with pebble-bed nuclear reactors or other types of power before the electric cars become reasonable. Come on Bush, lead. There is more to the war on terror than just military.
#2
go rj! We could also use better mass transit in major metro areas. The unions need to be fought on this issue as well. Don't know if it's still true, but in CA the taxi's union prevented mass transit from going to the airports and other useful locations.
#3
In addition, nuclear-generated electricity will tend to replace natural gas, currently being wasted at power plants, also gas is skyrocketing in price due to a relative scarcity. Natural gas is a great fuel for motor vehicles like city busses.
#4
The scarcity of natural gas is self-imposed via a series of lefty lawsuits blocking all attempts at buidling port facilities to handle imports of LNG. Three port facilities exist, twenty five are planned and all are either bogged down in litigation and/or hopelessly entangled in regulatory red tape.
#6
Imported LNG is still imported. On the other hand, I would very much like to pay the $2 per 1000 cubic feet I was paying in 1980 to heat my home, rather than the $13.50 I paid last month.
Sparks sure fly when the premodern world of religious piety and the postmodern world of Monty Python collide. Middle Eastern Muslims have demonstrated, threatened, boycotted and burned in their fury over European newspapers republishing months-old distasteful cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Stunned, European diplomats have tried in vain to explain to Arab ambassadors that, in the West, governments neither own nor muzzle an often unwise and tasteless press. Hurt feelings and much worse are the price we are supposed to pay for free expression so central to consensual government. Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Jews or Muslims in secular democracies simply don't burn foreign embassies when their faith is impugned in the free press.
Nor did the offended wish to hear that the intent of the cartoons, originally published in September by a Danish newspaper, was to ridicule extremists who use religion to justify terrorism and the killing of civilians, rather than gratuitously to insult Islam.
We are seeing an escalating clash of civilizations against a tense backdrop of the Iranian government's call for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, the election of Hamas terrorists in the Palestinian territories, and Western efforts to protect the new democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq from jihadist bombers.
There is a great asymmetry in all this. Western notions of cultural tolerance and liberality are the benchmarks Muslims employ to condemn insensitive European journalism. Meanwhile, the Islamic Middle East is given a pass, as anti-Semitic state-run papers there daily portray Jews grotesquely.
As the controversy heated up, the word globalization came up a lot, with many banally noting that "we are all interconnected now" and that what a small newspaper prints in a small country like Denmark can affect the entire world. But that is only half-true.
Globalization is, in fact, mostly a one-way process. Western technology, democracy, freedom, capitalism and popular culture continue to infect the non-West. Once there, they often bulldoze time-honored culture. That resulting clash leads to a radical divergence of perceptions. The cocky West assumes non-Westerners wish to emulate it. They often do, but also soon resent deeply their newfound dependence and appetites for what is often antithetical to traditional life.
Europeans and Americans rarely demonstrate when Jesus, the pope or the Jewish faith is lampooned abroad. In contrast, the insecure and touchy Middle East is hypersensitive about any affront to its religion or honor. Thus the mere possession of a Bible is felonious in Saudi Arabia, while mosques typically operate without scrutiny in once-Christian Europe.
There is also an expectation that Westerners, purportedly soft and decadent, will apologize for the excesses of their culture, while Muslims abroad need not for the extremism of an Iranian president promising another genocide or Osama bin Laden's periodic vow to murder thousands more Americans.
Indeed, a number of sadly misguided Westerners most prominently Bill Clinton have condemned the published cartoons, missing the issue entirely and so sending exactly the wrong message: A private Western newspaper can crassly editorialize and lampoon as it likes. If it couldn't, or if it censored itself from doing so out of fear, then there would simply no longer be a West as we know it. That's why papers across Europe, from Spain to Poland, have republished the cartoons and faced the consequences.
After the London and Madrid bombings, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the French riots and the failed European efforts to reason with the Iranian theocrats, Europe has had it with Islamic extremism. French President Jacques Chirac now openly talks about resorting to nuclear weapons against the state sponsors of terrorism. A new government in Germany compares the Iranian theocracy to Hitler. Muslim Turkey will probably not join the European Union, and Hamas may well lose its EU handouts.
And so now, in refusing to accept Muslim-imposed censorship, brave little countries like Demark and Holland are saying enough is enough and waiting, perhaps in vain, for a word of support from America or Britain.
Of course, in a logical world, most irreverent Westerners would not much worry whether a particular tactless newspaper provoked offense far abroad, despite the protestations of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Gulf royals. But oil dependency, Middle Eastern petrodollar surpluses, jihadist terrorism and fear of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorist-sponsoring regimes have, in varying ways, held too many in the West psychologically hostage.
But even more disturbing than such overt material constraints, the West is also increasingly unwilling to defend, or even to articulate, its own unique values, in fear of seeming hurtful and judgmental. In this latest incident, Europeans are expected to show remorse not so much for their bad taste as for their very way of life.
#2
The money quote for me is "the West is also increasingly unwilling to defend, or even to articulate, its own unique values, in fear of seeming hurtful and judgmental."
How's this articulation for starters:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Sparks sure fly when the premodern world of religious piety and the postmodern world of Monty Python collide. Middle Eastern Muslims have demonstrated, threatened, boycotted and burned in their fury over European newspapers republishing months-old distasteful cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
