Tuesday, February 07, 2006

More from Angry Muslims

I've gotten over the red heat of my own anger, and now it's on a slow simmer. Lots of news and even more commentary keeps coming out about the protests over the Mohammed cartoons.

The Jerusalem Post has printed the cartoons (from Monday's Guardian), making it the first leading newspaper in Israel to do so.

The Jerusalem Post did not wish to comment on its decision to publish when it was contacted today by MediaGuardian.co.uk.

But in an editorial published today, entitled "The Prophet's Honor", the paper contrasts the outcry that the Danish cartoons are causing in the Muslim world, while "Arab cartoonists routinely demonise Jews as global conspirators, corrupters of society and blood-suckers".

What's the worst that can happen to the Jerusalem Post over this? Palestinians will try to kill them. So what else is new?

Over in Iran, Iranians have attacked the Austrian embassy (from Monday's Reuters), not because any Austrian newspapers published the cartoons. It's because Austria currently holds the presidency of the EU. But that's not all that Iran is doing.

Iran has withdrawn its ambassador to Denmark and Iranian Commerce Minister Massoud Mirkazemi said on Monday that all trade with Denmark had been severed because of the cartoons, first published in September in a Danish newspaper.

In Lebanon, Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader and head of Lebanon's Progressive Socialist Party, accused Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime of using undercover soldiers acting as rioters to burn the Danish government offices in Damascus and Beirut (from Monday's WorldNetDaily).

"Syria is stirring trouble in the region. Regarding the burnings and protests in Damascus, it is very bizarre that a so-called secular totalitarian regime that controls everything was not able to control these demonstrations," said Jumblatt.

That's a good point, and it raises the same question about the attacks in Iran. Did all the lunatic-president's men orchestrate the embassy attack?

Meanwhile, the Australian pointed out Monday that depictions of Mohammed aren't new but have been happening both within and outside the Muslim world for a really long time.

Despite the outcry, the Danish cartoons of Mohammed are just the latest in a long line of depictions of the Muslim prophet, both in the West and in Islamic countries. From Ottoman religious icons to market stalls in Iran, from the US Supreme Court building to the South Park cartoon, Mohammed has been frequently portrayed in flattering and unflattering lights.

In the 14th century, the 16th century, the 20th century, and the 21st century. In Persian miniaturs, in Turkish paintings, and in depictions of Dante's Inferno by classical artists, like Auguste Rodin and Salvador Dali. In Mecca and in America. None of these sparked violence.

Denmark's newspapers didn't do anything new. The violent factions of the Muslim world just used Denmark as their latest excuse to commit violence. For the Muslim extremists, their violence must always be someone else's fault.

Dennis Prager (from his WorldNetDaily column today) points out the hypocrisy of Europe's appeaser countries.

As long as Muslim demonstrators only shouted "Death to America" and "Death to Israel," Europe (and the rest of the world's Left) found reasons either to ignore the Nazi-like evil inherent in those chants (and the homicidal actions that flowed from them) or to blame America and Israel for the hatred.

But like the earlier Nazis, our generation's fascists hate anything good, not merely Jews and Americans. And now the Damascus embassy of Norway, a leading anti-Israel "peace at any price" country, has been torched. And more and more Norwegians, and Brits, and French, and Dutch, and Swedes, and the rest of the European appeasers who blamed America for 9-11 and blamed Israel for Palestinian suicide bombings, are beginning to wonder whether there just might be something morally troubling within the Islamic world.


Let's hope they figure it out. Because, as Mark Steyn pointed out Sunday in the Chicago Sun-Times, there are dire consequences to "multicultural sensitivity."

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."

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