Category: The Dish

Jihadists are letting us know how they feel. Michelle Malkin has a stunning photographic line-up of protesters and placards in London. Here are some of the slogans: "Butcher Those Who Mock Islam"; "Exterminate Those Who Mock Islam"; "Be Prepared for the Real Holocaust". And so on. And these people have a right to say these things – the very right they are trying to deny others with the threat of violence. The only word that describes these people, taking to the streets and threatening the lives and security of people who exercize freedom of speech, is an obvious one: brownshirts. There is no compromise with them. And no way to appease them short of surrendering the bedrock of our civilization.

Some readers have made this worthwhile point. European countries would be in a stronger position to defend press freedom if they practised it more often. There’s a bill in the British parliament right now to make offending people’s religion a legal offense. Germany bans depictions of the swastika and makes Holocaust-denial a crime. One reason I love America is its First Amendment. I suspect it has something to do with the more moderate Muslim population in the United States, compared with Europe’s. Once you start censoring people, you have to deal with the problem of double-standards. If you defend free speech in every case, you’re on firmer ground.

The pictures of this morning’s John Bartlett fashion show are now up. More here. (Full disclosure: Bartlett and a couple of the Junior Jew bears are friends of mine.)

Now, they’re after showing opera to kids. Yes, an elementary school teacher is in hot water for showing a video with "the soprano Dame Joan Sutherland and three puppet friends discussing Gounod’s ‘Faust.’" "I think it glorifies Satan in some way," says a parent. Sigh.

The State Department response to the completely anodyne cartoons published in Denmark can only be described as pathetic appeasement. You’d think that no one in Foggy Bottom was aware of the intimidation of free thought in Europe by Islamist thugs. The cartoons were not designed to "incite religious or ethnic hatreds." They were designed to protest such incitement – and we have the corpses of Theo van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn as useful proof. It reminds me of the pusillanimous response of the first Bush administration to the despicable threat against Salman Rushdie. Clinton, of course, has been even worse. Then there’s this:

"Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images or any other religious belief," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

So where are the State Department condemnations of vile anti-Semitic cartoons published by government-run papers in the Middle East? Why the double standard? And just for the record: statements that offend people’s religious beliefs are perfectly acceptable in a free society. They may not always be admirable; they may even be objectionable. But freedom does not distinguish between "acceptable" words and "unacceptable" ones, when it comes to commenting on public matters, including – and especially – religion. And there is no more pressing public matter today than the intersection of fundamentalist extremism and politics. In this war, the Bush administration just made a strong statement. For the other side.

"Mona Omar Attia, Egypt’s ambassador to Denmark, said after a meeting with Rasmussen that she was satisfied with the position of the Danish government but noted the prime minister had said he could not interfere with the press. ‘This means the whole story will continue and that we are back to square one again. The government of Denmark has to do something to appease the Muslim world,’ Attia said." – from a Reuters report.

They still don’t get it, do they? And perhaps they never will.

"The pope has used the term ‘relativism’ to describe not only non-absolute standards, but also uncertain ones. The alternative to certainty, however, is not nihilism but the recognition of fallibility, the idea that even a very reasonable belief is not beyond question. If that’s all relativism means, then it is hardly the enemy of truth or morality," – Austin Dacey, New York Times today.

The argument, made by atheist liberals and born-again conservatives alike, that our only choice is fundamentalism or relativism is one of the great lies of our age.

Like smoking, it can damage your spouse’s health. I’ve now clocked 3,350 hours on my sleep apnea CPAP machine. My fiance is as grateful as I am.

This is the perfect response, it seems to me, to the intimidation of the press in Europe.It describes what Islamism is trying to do: threaten those who want to discuss and debate the intersection of fundamentalism and politics, the clash between freedom and faith. That the leftist paper, Le Monde, would publish this could be a sign that Europe is beginning to stand up again for the principles for which the West stands: tolerance, sure; faith, yes; freedom of speech: non-negotiable. If you don’t read French, the words say: "I must not draw Muhammed."

Islamists and Muslims are in a violent uproar about the publication of truly conventional political cartoons featuring the prophet Muhammed. Here are some other cartoons recently printed in the Arab, Muslim press. They are no different than Nazi propaganda in their unvarnished anti-Semitism. And I would defend the right of every one of those papers to publish them. Why, then, cannot Muslims return the favor? What is it about contemporary Islam that seems to make it clearly incompatible wih Western freedom of speech? In that may lie the answer to the most pressing question facing the West today: the illiberal, fanatical religious enemy within.