Why I Published the Muhammad Cartoons

Der Spiegel ^ | May 31, 2006 | By Flemming Rose

[rob777]

European political correctness allows Muslims to resist integration, argues the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten. Instead, Muslims should be treated just like all Europeans -- including being subject to satire. He argues that publishing the caricatures was an act of "inclusion, not exclusion."

The worldwide furor unleashed by the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed that I published last September in Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper where I work, was both a surprise and a tragedy, especially for those directly affected by it. Lives were lost, buildings were torched and people were driven into hiding. And yet the unbalanced reactions to the not-so-provocative caricatures -- loud denunciations and even death threats toward us, but very little outrage toward the people who attacked two Danish Embassies -- unmasked unpleasant realities about Europe's failed experiment with multiculturalism. It's time for the Old Continent to face facts and make some profound changes in its outlook on immigration, integration and the coming Muslim demographic surge. After decades of appeasement and political correctness, combined with growing fear of a radical minority prepared to commit serious violence, Europe's moment of truth is here.

[theDentist]

Heck, I thought he did it because they were so..."on target".

[edcoil]

Save your breath - when you take a bone from a dog, the dog will bite you. It does not matter why you took it.

This will never change.

[Vaquero]

[WV Mountain Mama]

...cause they were darn funny in their artistic, truthful accuracy.

[Plutarch]

This must be the article that G. Gordon Liddy read this morning.

[Savage Beast]

"As one who once championed the utopian state of multicultural bliss, I think I know what I'm talking about. I was raised on the ideals of the 1960s, in the midst of the Cold War. I saw life through the lens of the countercultural turmoil, adopting both the hippie pose and the political superiority complex of my generation." Etc.

Maybe you know what you're talking about, Fleming, and maybe you don't.

Many of us didn't have to go to the Soviet Union to understand that Marxism does not work or that it requires a brutal totalitarian government for its implementation.

Many of us didn't have to experiment with countercultural turmoil to understand that it was decadent, sick, and destructive.

Many of us didn't have to embrace the political superiority complex of the hippie genereation, to understand that it was a delusion.

Many of us understand that change is not necessarily improvement, that iconoclasm is not innovation, and that many things don't have to be tried to prove that they are a bad idea.

Many of us don't have to try the Decadence that has infected Europe to know that it will lead to doom and destruction.

Many of us don't have to try the harebrained ideas of the Left to know that they are harebrained and can only lead to the destruction of the U.S.A.

Many of us don't have to enter hubris and denial to know that they lead to tragedy.

Many of us don't have to try heroin to know that it leads to destruction.

The very fact that you had to try such things as you did suggests that you might not be the wisest of council and even that you might not be the best candidate for leadership or advice.

[4woodenboats]

One of the most outstanding articles I've read in some time, thanks for posting it.

[SaxxonWoods]

You too can be a forbidden cartoon publisher!


*-O((:~{>

[kenavi]

The very fact that you had to try such things as you did suggests that you might not be the wisest of council and even that you might not be the best candidate for leadership or advice.

I take it you don't believe in "Amazing Grace".

[4woodenboats]

So, if you were trying to find a way to get through to some 100 million liberals in this country who are stuck on Marxism and don't even know it, which would you use to guide them out of their peer/media/public education/parent induced psychosis?

A roadmap through and out of hell by someone who has shared every phlospophy and tripped in all the same potholes, yet finally found reality

Or some guy yelling at them that he's always known they were wrong and that he was right? What can come of that other than resentment and even more leftward leaning?

I would love to see hundreds of articles across the country like Flemings. Besides being an overt bow to the United States, it could change the leftward drift in this country almost overnight.

I don't see what you're having such a problem with.

[Dinah Lord]

Well said, 4woodenboats. Libs just don't get it and Flemming spells it out for them. It would be great if there were a hundred more articles just like this...

Cheers - Dinah

[Capt. Tom]

At the same time, Europeans must show a willingness to jettison entrenched notions of blood and soil and accept people from foreign countries and cultures as just what they are, the new Europeans.

Ruined the piece with this nonsense. The Muslims aren't going to Europe to become new Europeans.

You naive Infidel. - tom

[BunnySlippers]

[Albion Wilde]

Brillliant article, well worth the long read. I love several passages particularly:

It took me only 10 months as a young student in the Soviet Union ...to realize what a world without private property looks like...

Through close contact with courageous dissidents who were willing to...go to prison for their belief in the ideals of Western democracy, I was cured of my wooly dreams of idealistic collectivism.....the very freedoms that we had taken for granted in high school -- but did not grasp as values inherent in our civilization: freedom of speech, religion, assembly and movement. Justice and equality implies equal opportunity, I learned, not equal outcome.

Europe's left is deceiving itself about immigration, integration and Islamic radicalism today the same way we young hippies deceived ourselves about Marxism and communism 30 years ago.

The role of victim is very convenient because it frees the self-declared victim from any responsibility, while providing a posture of moral superiority. It also obscures certain inconvenient facts that might suggest a different explanation...

[SW6906]

Excellent analysis!

[SW6906]

Well put. I sent this article to about 30 people in my email address book - many of them liberals or just sheep. Maybe it will get them to think.

[AFPhys]

As one who once championed the utopian state of multicultural bliss, I think I know what I'm talking about. I was raised on the ideals of the 1960s, in the midst of the Cold War. I saw life through the lens of the countercultural turmoil, adopting both the hippie pose and the political superiority complex of my generation. I and my high school peers believed that the West was imperialistic and racist. We analyzed decaying Western civilization through the texts of Marx and Engels and lionized John Lennon's beautiful but stupid tune about an ideal world without private property: "Imagine no possessions/ I wonder if you can/ No need for greed or hunger/ A brotherhood of man/ Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world."

It took me only 10 months as a young student in the Soviet Union in 1980-81 to realize what a world without private property looks like, although many years had to pass until the full implications of the central Marxist dogma became clear to me.

That experience was the beginning of a long intellectual journey that has thus far culminated in the reactions to the Muhammed cartoons. Politically, I came of age in the Soviet Union. I returned there in 1990 to spend 11 years as a foreign correspondent. Through close contact with courageous dissidents who were willing to suffer and go to prison for their belief in the ideals of Western democracy, I was cured of my wooly dreams of idealistic collectivism. I had a strong sense of the high price my friends were willing to pay for the very freedoms that we had taken for granted in high school -- but did not grasp as values inherent in our civilization: freedom of speech, religion, assembly and movement.Justice and equality implies equal opportunity, I learned, not equal outcome.

Now, in Europe's failure to grapple realistically with its dramatically changing demographic picture, I see a new parallel to that Cold War journey. Europe's left is deceiving itself about immigration, integration and Islamic radicalism today the same way we young hippies deceived ourselves about Marxism and communism 30 years ago. It is a narrative of confrontation and hierarchy that claims that the West exploits, abuses and marginalizes the Islamic world. Left-wing intellectuals have insisted that the Danes were oppressing and marginalizing Muslim immigrants. This view comports precisely with the late Edward Said's model of Orientalism, which argues that experts on the Orient and the Muslim world have not depicted it as it is but as some dreaded "other," as exactly the opposite of ourselves -- that should therefore to be rejected. The West, in this narrative, is democratic, the East is despotic. We are rational, they are irrational.

Wow: very good analysis. I, too, have decided to send this on to some folks I know.

[Horatio Gates]

That is pretty good. I think that it's too late to assimilate the muslims. Radical Islam's leaders use perceived victimization as one tool to motivate the masses to rise up against the host country. Do any of these muslims have any loyalty to country? Even their homeland? It's always seemed to me that the loyalty lies with whatever they are spoon fed by radical islam in the name of Allah and the goal to subjugate the infidels remains no matter what Europe does to welcome them. Maybe there is hope for future generations but radical islam is bent on keeping them as the barbarians they are. All the more reason to satirize them and expose them for what they are