It has become clear that the assault on Jylland-Posten’s famous cartoons was whipped up by Islamofascists to whom the quaint term “outside agitators” can legitimately be applied. They traveled through the Middle East spreading their message of hatred and also, since the real drawings were not offensive by any reasonable standard, fabricated others. To put it bluntly, they blasphemed the prophet whom they profess to honor, in order to deceive their fellow Moslems. Their machinations led to dozens of killings (almost all of Moslems) and millions of dollars of property damage. In the eyes of God, they are no better than murderers and vandals. What do they hope to accomplish by their crimes?
Jim Geraghty, who has the perspective that comes from residing in a predominantly Moslem country, paints part of the picture:
And now back to our bad news, and signs that the Danish cartoons have ignited a chain reaction that will result in all-out conflict between the West and the Muslim world over their insistence that Muhammad cannot be mocked, ever, and our insistence that freedom of speech includes the insulting, the insensitive, the controversial and the blasphemous. . . .
After 9/11, “if X happens, then the terrorists have won” became a cliche. In this case it might be extraordinarily accurate to say, “If you conclude that Islam cannot coexist with Western values, then the terrorists have won.” . . .
A little less speculative is the question of how Westerners’ souring views on Islam affect our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Bush administration’s goal of bringing democracy and liberty to the Middle East. It’s hard to sell that idealistic mission to the American people when a surprisingly large chunk of your base sees the Muslim world as an irredeemable mass of hatred and violence.
As Geraghty notes, the elite news media are playing into the cartoon jihadists’ hands:
[T]he media (with notable exceptions) has proven itself to be worse than useless in covering the news; they have made an effort to make these cartoons seem unimaginably, unprintably taboo (instead of letting readers decide this for themselves) and they have covered up the degree to which threats and intimidation are repressing free discussion of ideas in non-Muslim countries. That is the story.
Deliberately arousing Western hostility might seem like a suicidal strategy. In a War Between Civilizations, the West, with gigantic advantages in men, money, technology and military skill, could crush even a united House of Islam – probably without going onto full war footing. Some of the jihadists may be insane enough to ignore the disparity of forces, but others are wholly rational. As Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies spells out, they plan to conquer without fighting a real war:
Muslim demonstrators have been torching embassies, stoning churches and threatening mass murder – to protest cartoons characterizing Muslims as violent extremists.
They have been burning flags and stomping on crosses and Stars of David – to express their outrage at those who say they are intolerant.
The damage these demonstrators are doing to the image of Islam is incalculable, far beyond what any poison-penned cartoonist could accomplish. So why are they doing it?
Machiavelli provided the answer more than 500 years ago. For those who would rule, he said, it is better “to be feared than loved.”
By now, all but the most self-deluded among us recognize that Militant Islamists are waging a War Against the West, a deadly jihad against Christians, Jews, Hindus and moderate Muslims. These religiously inspired fascists have no interest in being loved by “infidels.” They do, however, want to inspire fear – and they do want to rule.
The international intifada that has erupted – ostensibly in response to 12 cartoons first published in a Danish newspaper in September – is merely the Militant Islamists’ latest tactic. The charge most frequently leveled against the protestors is hypocrisy. How can they be up in arms over a few cartoons lampooning Muslims when, in many Muslim societies, Jews and Christians are routinely characterized in the most vicious terms and images? But that misses the point.
The Militant Islamists are not demanding equality. They are demanding superiority. They are Muslim supremacists – deological heirs to those who, in the 20th century, fought for Aryan supremacy and white supremacy.
Yousef Al-Qaradhawi – leader of the European Council for Fatwa and Research and president of the International Association of Muslim Scholars – is seen by some as the “hidden hand” behind the protests. He has candidly declared: “Islam will return to Europe as the conqueror.”
And because so many in the Western political elite loathe their own civilization while indulging in a sentimental romance with “oppressed peoples of the Third World”, this tactic succeeds. Bruce Bawer (no permalink), a homosexual cultural critic self-exiled from the United States, who has come to appreciate our country from an unusual vantage point, records the craven conduct of the governments of Norway and Sweden:
[O]n February 10, in Oslo, came a dramatic capitulation that seemed a classic case of sharia in action. For days, Velbjørn Selbekk, editor of the tiny Christian periodical Magazinet – the first publication to reprint the now-famous Muhammed cartoons from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten – had firmly resisted pressure by Muslim extremists (who made death threats) and by the Norwegian establishment (which urged him to give in). But then, on that morning – the day before a planned mass demonstration against the cartoons – Norway’s Minister of Labor and Social Inclusion, Bjarne Håkon Hanssen, hastily called a press conference at a major government office building in Oslo.
There, to the astonishment of his supporters, Selbekk issued an abject apology for reprinting the cartoons. At his side, accepting his act of contrition on behalf of 46 Muslim organizations and asking that all threats now be withdrawn, was Mohammed Hamdan, head of Norway’s Islamic Council. In attendance were members of the Norwegian cabinet and the largest assemblage of imams in Norway's history. It was a picture right out of a sharia courtroom: the dhimmi prostrating himself before the Muslim leader, and the leader pardoning him – and, for good measure, declaring Selbekk to be henceforth under his protection, as if it were he, Hamdan, and not the Norwegian police, that held in his hands the security of citizens in Norway. . . .
On Tuesday, as if Norway hadn’t already been disgraced enough, an official Norwegian delegation met in Qatar with Muslim leader Yusuf al Qaradawi (who has defended suicide bombers and the murder of Jewish women and children) and implored him to accept Selbekk’s apology for the cartoons. Lucky them: he did. “To meet Yusuf al-Qaradawi under the present circumstances,” the Norwegian-Iraqi writer Walid al-Kubaisi told Aftenposten yesterday, “is tantamount to granting extreme Islamists and defenders of terror a right of joint consultation regarding how Norway should be governed.” Yep.
Then again, at least Norway had its brief, shining moment of resistance. Not Sweden. Among the European leaders who have insisted firmly in recent days that their nations enjoyed free speech – only to insist even more firmly that that right must be exercised “responsibly” – was Swedish foreign minister Laila Freivalds, who, responding on February 9 to a Muhammed cartoon in the newspaper of the right-wing Swedish Democratic Party, didn’t just call for “responsibility” but enforced it, sending the Security Police to close down the party website. “It is frightful,” she sniffed, “that a small group of Swedish extremists can expose Swedes to a clear danger” – as if it were the Swedish Democrats, and not Islamic extremists, who were threatening violence. Lately, many Europeans have sought to explain to enraged Muslims that democratic states cannot silence the free expression of ideas; Freivalds appeared determined to show that in Sweden, at least, this is no longer the case.
To find further examples, public and private, is depressingly easy. Here in Illinois, the Daily Illini, the student newspaper of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, had its own “brief, shining moment of resistance”. It reprinted the Danish cartoons. Then came the retreat into dhimmitude. The editor responsible for the action was suspended, and the paper ran an apologetic editorial.
In my law school days, I was the Daily Illini’s token conservative columnist (in fact, just about its only columnist to the right of Che Guevara). When I saw that it had defied the Islamofascists, I was rather proud of it and thought of writing a congratulatory post. Just as well that I didn’t get around to it.
The consequence of these surrenders is not merely the damage done to freedom of speech and the press by concessions to Islamofascist demands. In yielding to our enemies, we make them look like Osama bin-Laden’s “strong horses” and thus help them attract new followers. To a great many on the Western Left, the first priority is demonizing George W. Bush. Hence, they are reluctant to resist even the most repulsive of those who oppose him. Enlisting those allies – “the enemies of my enemy” – and leveraging their displays of dhimmitude into an upsurge of Islamofascist power are what the Cartoon Jihad is ultimately all about.
Further reading: David Warren, “The Test”
James Lewis, “The Discreet Charm of the Danish Cartoons”
Dennis Prager, “American News Media: Little Courage and Little Honesty”
Joseph Tartakovsky, “Islamic Chauvinism and the Mohammed Cartoons”
Paul Belien & Filip van Laenen, “Muslims Create Islamophobes, Then Want Islamophobes Punished” (signs that resistance is not utterly dead)
Abraham H. Miller, “From Cartoons to Chaos”
Diana West, “Cartoon Network”
Vasko Kohlmayer, “Appeasement Unto Death”
