- It began last September.
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- Danish author Kaare Bluitgen couldn't
find an illustrator for his biography of Muhammad. Fundamentalist Muslims
frown on depictions of the prophet and-in one of many European cases of
self-censorship since the November 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker and Islam
critic Theo van Gogh-artists feared a reaction. Europe, you see, isn't
the liberal paradise you think it is, or knew it to be 10 or 20 years ago.
At this very moment, European liberalism is caught in a steadily intensifying
struggle with fundamentalist Muslim censoriousness-call it creeping Sharia.
Concerned about this trend and eager to make a statement about free speech,
Denmark's largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, invited illustrators to submit
drawings of Muhammad. On September 30, the paper printed 12 of them.
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- Most of the cartoons, frankly, were lame
and witless. A couple (notably one depicting Muhammad as a terrorist) were
provocative in the way editorial cartoons are supposed to be. But compared
to the lusty Christian baiting in movies like Life of Brian-or in various
artworks by Gilbert and George, among others-they were pretty tame stuff.
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- When artists bait Christians, the Christians
(at most) wave signs and send out press releases. When Danish Muslims saw
the Muhammad cartoons, they went ballistic. Thousands protested in Copenhagen.
Death threats were issued. On October 12, a group of Muslim ambassadors
demanded a meeting with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. He
refused. "It is so self-evidently clear what principles Danish society
is based upon," he said later, "that there is nothing to have
a meeting about."
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- Now, in today's Europe-where cultural
appeasement by political and media elites of the continent's largely unintegrated
and antidemocratic Muslim minority is standard practice-Fogh Rasmussen's
blunt stance was encouraging. Yet Danish Muslim leaders stepped up pressure-claiming
that the cartoons had wounded the delicate sensibilities of a billion of
their co-religionists around the world-and won allies. In December, Louise
Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, promised that "action"
on the cartoons would be forthcoming. (Apparently free speech was not on
her list of human rights.) The Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers
condemned the Danish media's "intolerance."
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- In statements read by many as apologies,
both Fogh Rasmussen and Jyllands-Posten Editor Carsten Juste said they
regretted that Muslims had been offended. But they weren't contrite enough
to satisfy critics. In late January, Saudi Arabia-top funder of Europe's
radical mosques and Muslim schools-pushed for a boycott of Danish goods.
Hacker attacks originating in the Middle East closed down Danish newspaper
websites and blogs. Terrorists ordered Scandinavians out of Gaza. Palestinians
burned Danish flags. Mobs attacked and burned Danish embassies in Damascus
and Beirut. Every day, it seemed things couldn't get worse-and they kept
getting worse.
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- Many Europeans agree with Kofi Annan
that freedom "should always be exercised in a way that fully respectsS
religious beliefs, " and with Sunday Times (UK) columnist Simon Jenkins
that the main question here is "whether we truly want to share a world
in peace with those who have values and religious beliefs different from
our own." What's called for, they say, is "respect," "restraint,"
and "responsibility." And, above all, "sensitivity."
For them, this is simply a case of the powerful mocking the faith of the
weak.
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- On the contrary, what's happening here
is that a gang of bullies-led by a country, Saudi Arabia, where Bibles
are forbidden, Christians tortured, Jews routinely labeled "apes and
pigs" in the state-controlled media, and apostasy from Islam punished
by death-is trying to compel a tiny democracy to live by its own theocratic
rules. To succumb to pressure from this gang would simply be to invite
further pressure, and lead to further concessions-not just by Denmark but
by all of democratic Europe. And when they've tamed Europe, they'll come
after America.
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- After all, the list of Western phenomena
that offend the sensibilities of many Muslims is a long one-ranging from
religious liberty, sexual equality, and the right of gay people not to
have a wall dropped on them, to music, alcohol, dogs, and pork. After a
few Danish cartoons, what's next?
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- Make no mistake, this is no isolated
incident. It's one step in a long-term effort by extreme Muslim forces
to erode Western liberties and turn free, affluent countries into mirror
images of their own dysfunctional dictatorships. "Muslims have a dream
of living in an Islamic society," declared a Danish Muslim leader
in 2000. "This dream will surely be fulfilled in DenmarkS. We will
eventually be a majority." (Or as a T-shirt popular among young Muslims
in Stockholm puts it: "2030-then we take over.") Even after the
bombings in Madrid and London and the riots in Paris, many European leaders
continue to be in denial about this effort; others, as eager as Neville
Chamberlain at Munich to "keep the peace," seem already to have
chosen a policy of gradual surrender, accompanied by flurries of sycophantic
praise for Islam and apology for Western liberties.
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- Bat Ye'or, a Jewish Egyptian woman whose
splendid 2005 book Eurabia is a veritable catalog of the European political
establishment's systematic toadying to autocratic Muslim governments, has
a name for this toadying: "dhimmitude," a reference to the historical
Islamic practice of tolerating infidels so long as they accept their role
as "dhimmis," i.e., second-class citizens without rights under
Muslim law. Clearly, many agitators saw Jylland-Posten's cartoons as an
opportunity to nudge an already largely passive and sycophantic Europe
a step closer to full-fledged dhimmi status.
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- No, most Danes don't want to be dhimmis:
In poll results released in late January, 79 percent of them said Fogh
Rasmussen owed nobody an apology. (This is, let it be remembered, the only
European country that stood up to the Nazi "final solution" by
ferrying its own Jews to safety.) But millions of Europeans have already
internalized Islamic taboos and accepted the need to curb liberties in
order to "keep the peace." For them, Muslim rage-and its expression
in acts of violence and death threats-is already an accepted part of life
that is simply not to be questioned or criticized; in their view, the fault
lies with those who provoke the rage by failing to be good enough dhimmis.
"There is something wrong with a democracy," read a typical viewer
SMS on a Norwegian news discussion program, "where an editor can put
the whole country in danger!" EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson
was one of many who spoke of outraged Muslims as if they were a force of
nature-every re-publication of the cartoons by other European newspapers,
he said, "is adding fuel to the flames." Across Europe, the same
kind of leftists who reflexively cheer art for outraging Christians now
uphold Muslims' sacred right not to be offended.
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- For me, the most positive surprise in
all this has been the courage with which many European editors-some of
whom I'd considered dhimmis-have reprinted the cartoons in a show of support
for free speech. Most impressive of all, Le Monde, widely viewed as French
dhimmi central, ran its own witty drawing. For this American, the most
disgraceful development has been a statement by the U.S. State Department
suggesting that the U.S. stands alongside Islamist agitators and against
Denmark-perhaps our most loyal ally in the struggle against Islamist terror.
"After this act of betrayal," Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard
e-mailed me, "one might well ask why we should keep our troops in
Iraq and increase our presence in Afghanistan." (Later, in an interview
with Jyllands-Posten, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried said that
the U.S.'s posture was one of "unconditional solidarity" with
Denmark. Let's hope so.)
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- As for Juste, the editor of Jyllands-Posten,
he said the other day that European integration "is perhaps an impossible
project. This affair shows that there is a gulf between Western man and
the Muslim world that is greater than the Grand Canyon." As the unrest
has grown exponentially by the day, this truth has become increasingly
hard to deny.
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- Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept: How
Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within will be available from
Doubleday in February.
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