From one Reuters story:
A Pakistani Muslim cleric and his followers offered rewards amounting to over $1 million for anyone who killed Danish cartoonists who drew caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad that have enraged Muslims worldwide.
And from another Reuters story:
The cartoonists who produced the images of the Prophet for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten are in hiding and under police protection.
The Western response is unbelievably misinformed and craven. The radical mullahs have somehow been allowed to seize the initiative and define the issue.
The first story linked above states as a point of information:
Muslims believe images of the Prophet are forbidden.
Well, some Muslims today do, because they are being propagandized by an extreme, puritanical and iconoclastic mutant sect of Islam. But as Robert Leiken stated in the piece I quoted in this post:
It is the Salafists, the Islamists, not Islam, that prohibit such depictions. Portraits of Muhammad adorned the galleries of Muslim rulers for centuries.
The first Reuters piece also reports:
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and French President Jacques Chirac both said on Friday that it was a mistake to publish the cartoons.Clinton, on a private visit to Pakistan, said he saw nothing wrong with Muslims around the world demonstrating in a peaceful way, but he feared a great opportunity to improve understanding had been squandered.
"This is not a time to burn bridges; this is a time to build them," he said, adding, "...I can tell you that most people are horrified that this much misunderstanding has occurred."
Chirac was more blunt.
"I am appalled by what happened as a result of the publications of these cartoons," Chirac told India Today news magazine which published an interview with him on Friday.
"I am, of course, in favor of the freedom of the press, which is a pillar of democracy. But I am equally for respecting everyone's sensibilities... So I deplore the situation," said Chirac.
Wait a minute. The most offensive of the cartoons -- which showed Mohammed as a pedophile, Mohammed costumed as a pig, and a praying Muslim being sodomized by a dog -- were never even published in the Danish paper; they were fakes! How much of the rioting and burning is actually being driven by ignorant outrage at these lies?
This is not a "clash of civilizations," it's a calculated and scandalously successful offensive by radical Islamists in their war on the West. And the West has played right into their hands. The only fault of the Danish cartoonists was providing a weak pretext for this disinformation campaign, but if it hadn't been that it would have been something else. The campaign's success depends both on the West's desire to respect others' legitimate sensitivities (in itself not a bad thing, within reason), and on the "Arab street's" penchant to believe whatever emotion dictates. I have no doubt that even were the West or moderate Muslims to keep hammering the point that the really vile cartoons were fakes perpetrated by the mobs' own leaders, it would simply not be believed.
These are clever, clever devils, these Islamists, and so very dangerous. They have no scruples about inciting mobs by any means necessary, and they are bent on seizing power and getting nukes. That they might engineer the assassination of Musharraf and take control of Pakistan seems a real and deadly danger.
UPDATE: So much is explained by Dr. Sanity's definitive post on the disconnect between a "guilt culture" and a "shame culture":
There is no shame involved in insulting or denigrating other cultures for Muslims. Therefore such insults are acceptable. That is why there is a disconnect between the disgusting cartoons that are incredibly offensive to Jews and Christians and/or the West [ . . . ] yet at the same time, they angrily DEMAND on threat of violence that even the most mildly offensive cartoons (i.e., the Danish ones here) be immediately repudiated.SHAME MUST BE AVOIDED AT ALL COSTS. Everything else is secondary. Contradictions are irrelevant; logic and reason unimportant. HONOR MUST BE RESTORED, and this can only be done at the expense of those who originated the "insult".
Meanwhile, in our guilt culture, we obsess about how we might have hurt their feelings and some of us (not me) actually desire to make amends and apologize. This is laudable and very sensitive. It underscores the sense of tolerance that has evolved within Western culture. However well-meaning, IT WILL NOT WORK , particularly in the long-run. Making an apology for having "shamed" someone in such a culture is merely a sign of weakness from their perspective (since you are shaming yourself by admitting guilt), and hence only escalates the self-righteousness and demands that follow; [ . . . ]
The conundrum facing the West in dealing with Islam is that if Islam backs down from its demands, the resulting humiliation only increases the entire culture's sense of shame (which has been high for some centuries now) and brings it closer to the reality of a ticking time bomb that can blow up the rest of the world.
And sadly; the reverse situation--if the West, out of guilt and a sense of justice and fair play, backs down and permits Islam to restore its honor over the Danish cartoon issue at the expense of the West's cultural values; Islam will perceive such appeasement as the ultimate weakness and will be encouraged in thinking that it is the superior culture that will conquer and dominate the world. Hence even that scenario offers no relief for the world from the ticking time bomb that is Islam.
In other words, there appears to be no way to avoid a final confrontation.
Comments