February 8, 2006
Cartoons and Islamic Imperialism
By Daniel
Pipes
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.
Mr.
Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org)
is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures
(Transaction Publishers).
