Posted on 02/07/2006 6:48:32 AM PST by forty_years
The key issue at stake in the battle over the twelve Danish cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad is this: Will the West stand up for its customs and mores, including freedom of speech, or will Muslims impose their way of life on the West? Ultimately, there is no compromise: Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not.
More specifically, will Westerners accede to a double standard by which Muslims are free to insult Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, while Muhammad, Islam, and Muslims enjoy immunity from insults? Muslims routinely publish cartoons far more offensive than the Danish ones . Are they entitled to dish it out while being insulated from similar indignities?
Germany's Die Welt newspaper hinted at this issue in an editorial: "The protests from Muslims would be taken more seriously if they were less hypocritical. When Syrian television showed drama documentaries in prime time depicting rabbis as cannibals, the imams were quiet." Nor, by the way, have imams protested the stomping on the Christian cross embedded in the Danish flag.
The deeper issue here, however, is not Muslim hypocrisy but Islamic supremacism. The Danish editor who published the cartoons, Flemming Rose, explained that if Muslims insist "that I, as a non-Muslim, should submit to their taboos ... they're asking for my submission."
Precisely. Robert Spencer rightly called on the free world to stand "resolutely with Denmark." The informative Brussels Journal asserts, "We are all Danes now." Some governments get it:
Norway: "We will not apologize because in a country like Norway, which guarantees freedom of expression, we cannot apologize for what the newspapers print," Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg commented.
Germany: "Why should the German government apologize [for German papers publishing the cartoons]? This is an expression of press freedom," Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble said.
France: "Political cartoons are by nature excessive. And I prefer an excess of caricature to an excess of censorship," Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy commented.
Other governments wrongly apologized:
Poland: "The bounds of properly conceived freedom of expression have been overstepped," Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz stated.
United Kingdom: "The republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong," Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said.
New Zealand: "Gratuitously offensive," is how Trade Negotiations Minister Jim Sutton described the cartoons.
United States: "Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable," a State Department press officer, Janelle Hironimus, said.
Strangely, as "Old Europe" finds its backbone, the Anglosphere quivers. So awful was the American government reaction, it won the endorsement of the country's leading Islamist organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. This should come as no great surprise, however, for Washington has a history of treating Islam preferentially. On two earlier occasions it also faltered in cases of insults concerning Muhammad.
In 1989, Salman Rushdie came under a death edict from Ayatollah Khomeini for satirizing Muhammad in his magical-realist novel, The Satanic Verses. Rather than stand up for the novelist's life, President George H.W. Bush equated The Satanic Verses and the death edict, calling both "offensive." The then secretary of state, James A. Baker III, termed the edict merely "regrettable."
Even worse, in 1997 when an Israeli woman distributed a poster of Muhammad as a pig, the American government shamefully abandoned its protection of free speech. On behalf of President Bill Clinton, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns called the woman in question "either sick or … evil" and stated that "She deserves to be put on trial for these outrageous attacks on Islam." The State Department endorses a criminal trial for protected speech? Stranger yet was the context of this outburst. As I noted at the time, having combed through weeks of State Department briefings, I "found nothing approaching this vituperative language in reference to the horrors that took place in Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands lost their lives. To the contrary, Mr. Burns was throughout cautious and diplomatic."
Western governments should take a crash course on Islamic law and the historically-abiding Muslim imperative to subjugate non-Muslim peoples. They might start by reading the forthcoming book by Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale).
Peoples who would stay free must stand unreservedly with Denmark.
http://netwmd.com/blog/2006/02/07/364
That's what "Islam" means--submission, subjection and slavery.
Hmmm, it appears we're more French than the French on this issue.
Islam assumes that the entire world is destined to be subjugated by it, we just haven't accepted their heel yet.
As long as I am alive, their dream will not come to pass.
Iran presents: Holocaust cartoon contest
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3212064,00.html
Leading newspaper presents contest in response to cartoons disparaging Muhammad
Roee Nahmias
Iran's most popular daily newspaper, Hamshahri, is set to initiate a Holocaust cartoon contest in what it says is a response to cartoons disparaging Islam's prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper.
"This will be an international cartoon competition on the topic of the Holocaust," said Farid Mortazawi, the paper's graphic editor.
The editor added the newspaper intends to fight back by claiming the publication of Holocaust cartoons is done in the name of freedom of expression.
"Western newspapers published these caricatures, which constitute desecration, under the pretense of freedom of expression," he said. "Let's see if they mean what they say once we publish Holocaust caricatures."
Meanwhile, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a leading Muslim Brotherhood cleric, has condemned the harsh reactions to the cartoons among Muslim communities around the world.
Speaking on al-Jazeera's Sharia program, Qaradawi said: "The acts of destruction carried out by a minority of people in capitals around the world are unacceptable as a response to what European newspaper published. We never called on people to burn cars. We call on you to show the fury in an intelligent way as to avoid unthinkable damage."
"We condemn those who are attacking us when we do not attack them. We are bound by the laws of Allah and to his instructions," said Qaradawi, who has a major influence on the Arab Muslim community and on Muslim communities in the West
Qaradawi attacks freedom of speech
Responding to a question about churches damaged in Beirut by rioting masses, Qaradawi said: "This is unacceptable. We have seen Muslim imams preventing people from doing this, but it seems there are those who will exploit the rage of the people to pour fuel on the fire."
Qaradawi has called for "sanctions on countries that published the cartoons in their newspapers. We demand an international law forbidding religions from being humiliated, and we held a rally as a response to these injuries. These are the ways to respond."
Qaradawi also condemned freedom of speech, saying: "No one has this freedom. When you drive in a car, you can't swerve right and left because there are other people on the road with you. You must drive according to traffic laws."
Meanwhile, 400 Iranian protesters threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at the Danish Embassy in Teheran. Earlier, the Austrian Embassy in the Iranian capital was attacked.
Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel.
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Unless you are dying soon, I wouldn't bet on it.
I stand by my statement. As long as I am alive, Islam will not rule the entire world, even if I am the lone exception.
I wouldn't be suprized that in the near future they will demand their own state, or inhabit one which calls for separation from the union. A likely place for that to happen is Michigan/buffalo area. That's where they are concentrated across the border in canader as well.
India has a history lesson we should study. Creating Paki-stan
didn't solve their problems, it just made it the worlds' problem.
You won't be alone. I'll join you, and I'm sure many others will as well.
There's nothing on the planet you can compare these freaks "brains" to without insulting the object being compared: 2 month-old gophers...rocks...steaming piles of horsesh!t......nothing.
It's not a cycle of hate these toe-biters are spiraling in, it's a cycle of dumbass.
It's too bad Cutting-Off-Your-Nose-To-Spite-Your-Face isn't an Olympic sport....muslims would pw0n it.
Tyical brainwashed Muslim, blind to his own cults transgressions.
The only thing I can think of is that we have a lot more troops on the ground that would be at risk. Maybe we feel like we've got more to lose from mobs of wild eyed Mahometan head-choppers. But even that does not tell the whole story, for there are Danes and Poles on the ground in Iraq, and most of the other European countries have troops in Afghanistan.
We should pick a day very soon, when all of these cartoons ought to be published simultaneously on the front page of every paper in the non-Muslim world, as a show of unity of civilized people against the howling Mahometan filth.
I can sort of understand why these folks are offended, but why now? This was stirred up by imams and mullahs to rile up the population while Iran is under international pressure.
Rioting is never acceptable, but protest is. But you also have to accept the other person's right to an opinion and a worldview, however you may disagree with it. Islamofascists and liberals don't accept the legitimacy of that.
It's not just the troops. We have a huge stake in the success of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and if the U.S. is seen as jumping into a pissing contest between Europe and the Muslim world, we will lose much of the ground we have gained in those places.
I'm not thrilled about it, either, but the bigger picture is, we, as U.S. citizens, are still free to print and say what we want. Our government has to be diplomatic, but we don't.
I was thinking something very similar. There's Europe...with the bombings in Mardrid and London they were still speaking the same multi-culti party line. The issue they pick to really display that they have at least a small set? Cartoons....what a bizarre hill to pick to charge up, given what they've been through...
Nevertheless, I haven't been pleased with the US's response to these zealots since the days right after 9/11.
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