More on the Cartoons

This morning, I read an editorial in USA Today, written by a Muslim journalist, that tried to explain the outrage over the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad. She made the following statement:

Depicting Mohammed is generally prohibited in Islam. Portrayals, however, have and can be done in honorable ways. Persian Muslims, for many centuries, have illustrated the life of the prophet through miniature paintings. The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington has a frieze of Mohammed. But these depictions are done with dignity. What we saw in the European papers were blatantly disrespectful.

Right. I think she's missing the point. I believe the point of the cartoons is that the actions they depict - suicide bombings, acquiring nuclear weapons, etc. - are "blatantly disrespectful" of the prophet Muhammad and Islam.

Killing women and children in the name of your god is OK, but drawing a cartoon of your god's prophet, well... that just crosses the line.

Interesting article. I think the authors overstate their point a little, as there has been plenty of outrage expressed over each of the Muslim activities cited - particularly over the Taliban's destruction of the ancient Buddhas. Theodore Van Gogh's murder did not pass unremarked upon either, to say the least.

However, the authors are correct that the Muslim response to indignities vs. the West's response to indignities provides a a stark contrast. The first problem we face is that we live in liberal countries, and I do not mean "liberal" in any perjorative sense. We respect the right of all people to believe in whatever they want. If someone wants to have a Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, they can do so. If Dan Brown wants to write a book about Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene and the Catholic Church's 2000 year murderous cover-up, he can. People can even believe that we're really the product of an alien colonization experiment, and if people do so believe, apparently, we'll pay them millions of dollars to be in movies.

Thus, we cannot, as a core principle of our various Western governments, wage war against a religion. And, in fact, we will create international waves when China does wage such a war, even though the persecuted religion is clearly a weird cult. The flip side of this is that when cults or sects become physical and/or political threats to our society, their protection ends. Whether we are talking about the IRA, PLO, Black Panthers, ELF, etc., when you pick up a gun or a bomb, the First Amendment (or international equivalent) is no longer a shield.

The second problem that Western countries face is a corrolary to the first problem. Since we allow people to believe and say whatever they want, short of the point of threatening society, and not all Muslims are extremists, how do we tell who the bad guys are? Where we are falling short, it seems to me, is that we are not demanding that Muslims make their position on these matters clear. We do not want or intend to wage war "on Islam." Neither, however, are we mind-readers. For the sake of self-protection, therefore, I propose the only reasonable course is to wage war against all who are against us and who refuse to make their views clearly known.

I suspect that few have the stomach for this, and, to be sure, it would be a costly course of action. But when you consider one of the authors' minor points, that native Europeans are being out-bred by their Muslim immigrant counterparts, is there another reasonable course of action?