Redstate

Revisiting the "cartoon intifada" and the Islamist definition of "proportional response"

By Jeff Emanuel Posted in Featured Stories | War — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

[Editor's note] In light of the violent protests against the Pope for implying that Islam might have violent tendencies, I thought that it might be a good time to revisit this piece from February, when the "Cartoon Riots" were at their height, and when the precedent was unofficially set for the Muslim world's overwhelmingly violent response to any perception of insult.

Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria burned to the ground. Danish embassy in Beirut, same fate. Petrol bombs hurled at the Austrian embassy in Iran. Editorial cartoonists and editors in hiding, having been threatened by Hamas (now the official government of Palestine) and other Islamic leaders with kidnap and execution. Flags burned. Norwegian embassy in Iran attacked with stones and firebombs. Calls for "holy war" against Britain and America. Violent protests raging from Pakistan, India, and Indonesia, to the middle east, to Europe, including Denmark, France, and Great Britain. UN peacekeepers evacuated from Afghan towns as protestors rush their outposts with automatic weapons and grenades. Demonstrators throwing rocks, chanting "nuke nuke Denmark" and carrying signs which say "Europe take some lessons from 9/11," "Exterminate those who slander Islam," and "Behead those who insult Islam."

As the worldwide violence surrounding the outrage ignited by a dozen Danish cartoons reached a fever pitch, more facts came out and the motivation for these "protests" became much, much clearer.

READ ON...

The story began in the summer of 2005, when Danish author Kare Bluitgen, who was writing a children's book about Mohammed, was having trouble finding an illustrator for his work. In response to this, Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten sponsored a contest which invited readers to submit their own illustrations, and the top twelve caricatures were published in a September 30th issue of the paper. That's right--these cartoons were originally published four months before the violent reaction to them.

Three weeks later, on Oct. 20th, ambassadors from 11 Muslim countries requested, but were refused, a meeting with Danish Prime Minister Andres Rasmussen to complain about the illustrations. Mr. Rasmussen apologized for the perceived insult caused by the caricatures, but explained his refusal to meet with the representatives because, "as prime minister I have no tool whatsoever to take actions against the media, and I don't want that kind of tool."

With that, the matter was put to rest until January 2006, when four Muslim clerics from Denmark (including at least one, Abu Ladan, with terrorist ties) traveled to the middle east to incite rage against their home country and continent. They took with them the 12 published cartoons, but had somehow obtained three others which they attributed to the Danish cartoonists—but which have since been shown to have been drawn up by the clerics themselves. These three added drawings included a caricature of Mohammed with a pig's snout, as well as a depiction of him as a pedophile.

The first shot was fired on January 29th, almost four months to the day after the initial publishing of the cartoons, when gunmen in Gaza took over the offices of the European Union. "In response," wrote Jack Kelly at RealClearPolitics, "some newspapers in Norway, Germany and France published the cartoons to show solidarity with their Danish colleagues." This included an amazing show of backbone by the French, who, in the daily Le Monde, printed a comic of Mohammed drawn entirely of lines which, in French, said "I must not draw Mohammed." The reaction to these reprints was the beginning of a series of riots which grew to span half the globe, with radical Muslim leaders seeking to fan the flames even higher.

Iran and Saudi Arabia cut trade ties with Denmark at the end of January, leaving the Danish dairy industry without one of the major outlets for its goods, and on the heels of this boycott followed extremely coordinated protests and clashes of ever-increasing violence and brutality. Syria, Lebanon, and Iran are the hosts to the greatest violence. Not coincidentally, all three are effectively totalitarian Islamic states. In which such nation could a mob of the size being seen in Iran or Syria possibly obtain weapons, congregate, and perpetrate violence and destruction on such a large scale--firing automatic weapons, burning buildings to the ground--without governmental knowledge or, more importantly, governmental consent?

Iran, in particular, has become more and more active in the boycotting of, and violence toward, the European delegations it is hosting, and is now sponsoring a "Holocaust cartoon contest" in supposed retaliation for this perceived insult. Insight into the timing for this sudden, coordinated flare-up now centered on Iran was given by British blogger David Conway. On February 4, the International Atomic Energy Agency referred Iran to the UN Security Council, where it could be sanctioned economically for its nuclear enrichment program. As Conway pointed out, when the IAEA recommendation is taken up in March, the new acting chair of the organization will be Denmark. "Suddenly the pieces fall into shape," he said. The situation "suddenly escalated, complete with fabricated offensive cartoons, to so inflame Muslim opinion that Denmark could be intimidated ... into voting in favor of Iran."

Regardless of the potential accuracy of this theory, one thing is certain: this situation has progressed far beyond anything even remotely resembling the simple protest of a dozen caricatures of Mohammed and other Muslims. Even if it had been about that in the beginning, it is now about something much deeper, and the violence itself, along with the West's reaction to it, is very telling. Global terror, which has at its heart violet Islamists, is not a series of isolated responses to various slights, religious or economic, against Islam and its followers. It is not limited to several small, independent wars in places such as Chechnya, the Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Spain, or Great Britain. It is not caused by America's possession of wealth and resources at the supposed expense of the welfare of the citizens of Muslim nations. (Osama bin Laden's personal net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars alone gives the lie to that theory.) Rather, each of these is an ever-expanding front in the same war--a war in which the culture on the offensive, radical Islam, honestly believes that it is they who are being persecuted if their opponents dare defend themselves, and a war in which the culture which is being attacked, Western liberal democracy and the freedom it entails, is constantly on the run, always looking for ways to appease its aggressor, and always is terrified to fight back for fear of "causing offense," or worse, of provoking another attack.

For the radical Islamists of this world are not waging a constant war against the west to prevent their own defeat; rather, they seek the destruction of everything in existence which is not completely and totally under their control. Their warped understanding of our way of life, and of freedom as a whole, is borne out in the four simple words written on a placard carried by a protestor in Great Britain, ostensibly in response to a dozen offensive cartoons, but carried out in a country which has refused to print a single one of them. The sign, crudely written in black upper-case script, simply says "FREEDOM GO TO HELL."

To begin to comprehend the radical Islamist movement, one must begin with the simple concept of "freedom." To the radical Islamist, "freedom" is an unknown entity, as foreign as peace with the Jews. To the radical Islamist, "freedom" is a word whose meaning is as far from our understanding of the concept as is the idea that there are people in this world, whom we have never met, for which the greatest satisfaction of the deepest desires of their hearts would be to see every last one of us dead. To the radical Islamist, the only emotion that the word "freedom" inspires is one of deepest loathing and bloodthirstiest hatred. To the radical Islamist, "freedom" equals the one thing which he cannot allow, and which he would give his life to prevent or wipe out: a culture, region, or individual in this world which is not under his complete and utter dominance and control.

The truth has been borne out in the near-global response to a dozen poorly scribbled cartoons. These are the people who beheaded innocent Christian girls in Indonesia, and showed no remorse. These are the people who flew passenger-laden airliners into the two icons of the New York City skyline, killing 3,000 people, and then blamed America for deserving it. These are the people who murdered 300 schoolchildren and teachers in Beslan, Russia, shooting many in the back as they tried to escape their terrorist captors, and then claimed that Russia had brought the massacre on herself for her refusal to capitulate to outlandish demands. These are the people who murdered 50 Londoners, and injured 700 more, in the 7/7 attacks, and glorified those four suicide bombers who carried out that atrocity, branding them the "Fantastic Four." So much carnage, and so little response from any responsible Muslims anywhere in the world...and now, a caricature of the prophet Mohammed is alleged to have provoked this widespread, murderous response.

May we and the rest of the Western world, who have so long been blind to the mindless, hate-filled threat which is bearing down on us, let this chain of events finally cause the scales to fall from our eyes, that we may begin not only to see what we face, but to react to it--before it is, in fact, too late.