From the “Life of Brian” department:
Cairo: About 20,000 people converged on a south Egypt village to be blessed by a calf born, they believed, as God’s reply to the publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons. Its skin folds were said to have formed, “There is no God but Allah”.
of a crowd, sending bystanders fleeing in terror. It was part of an effort to inflate both the body count and the number of photo-ops.
Israel’s third disadvantage is media convention itself. Gutmann reminds us that all news is constructed: “Behind every picture there is a long story and a regiment of people who brought that particular picture, of all possible pictures, to you.” And construction is rarely better than its architects: “producers sitting in carpeted, climate-controlled studios in New York and London are making war their subject…. [A]nd journalists, dumped on the ground with little prior knowledge, are forced to condense and ‘package’ terribly complex and crucial events.” The general leftism in the news media gives reporters and producers many ways of introducing their bias into the simplified narrative: “David and Goliath, Poor versus Rich, the Third World versus Western Colonialism, Man versus Machine, even you-in-third-grade versus those-guys-who-always-beat-you-up after school.” With Israel and the Palestinians, the overall result is “Large Mechanized Brutes versus Small Vulnerable Brown People.”
And yes, the case of Mohammed al-Dura is discussed.
o our own Bendt Bendtsen [a Danish Politician]. Once we had to be sensitive to the easily hurt feelings of the Nazis, then came the Communists, now it is the Islamists. The reason I say ‘Islamists’ is that I do not for a moment believe all the world’s Muslims are pissing on us. I think we are dealing with thugs, fools and misled people. Those are the ones we have to deal with, and then the chickenshit politicians.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, in the Weekly Standard (via), argues that the weak conciliatory response from most Western leaders to Muslim protests over the Danish cartoons, most notably here and in the US, is selling out moderate Muslims:
For better or worse, expatriate and foreign-educated Middle Easterners have helped to shape decisively the secular and religious cultures that have dominated their homelands since World War II. Many of the best and brightest of the Middle East now live abroad. Many have sought greater freedom of expression and personal liberty in the West. Is it Presidents Clinton and Chirac’s desire that Muslim satirists never develop because their work would be insensitive to less irreverent Muslims? In its heyday, Islamic civilization contained many heterodox and heretical strains. In particular, Shiism, always a vehicle for minority protest, was rich in movements and cultural experimentation that sometimes electrified and horrified the Sunni Muslim world.
It is possible that Muslims living outside the Middle East will have a substantial role to play in revivifying Islamic civilization–in shedding some light on the convulsive path that one may still hope will lead from dysfunctional dictatorship through bin Ladenism to more peacefully self-critical, democratic societies. If Westerners appease Muslims who countenance violent intimidation, we are doing a terrible injustice to the liberal and progressive Muslims among us, who really would like to live in lands where people can say about the Prophet Muhammad what they have said about Jesus, Mary, and Moses. Among the Muslims of the United States and Europe, if not in the Middle East, there are many who have Western cultural sentiments and wit. The irreverent, religiously skeptical Western elite has Muslim members and Middle Eastern counterparts of equal intelligence and similar tastes. […]
[T]he controversy over the Danish cartoons could conceivably betray the most important, though least remembered, player in this controversy: the average Muslim in the Middle East. Far more than most Middle Eastern Muslims and politically correct Western scholars of the region and Islam would like to admit, Western standards for individual liberty, curiosity, personal integrity, scholarship, and the political relations among men have become the defining benchmarks for Muslims everywhere, however resented or admired. If our standards collapse and give way to fear, theirs in the long-term have no chance whatsoever. The psychology of victimization–surely one of the worst gifts the Western anti-imperialist left has given the Muslim world–can only be made worse by Westerners who treat Muslims like children unable to compete and to defend their religion.
Amir Taheri in another excellent article expands on his earlier insight: that militant Islam is “a global fascist movement masquerading as religion”.
Isn’t Islam supposed to be a religion? Shouldn’t it be concerned with the broader issues of human existence rather than with a set of cartoons, a Dutch television documentary, the head-covers of French schoolgirls or a novel by a British-Indian author? Today the visible Islam, the loudest Islam, is a political movement masquerading as a religion. Many mosques in this country have been transformed into political clubs where Kashmir, Iraq and Palestine and “the misdeeds of Anglo-Saxon imperialism” have replaced issues of religious faith as the principal theme.
Not long ago when I asked an imam in a London mosque why it was that God hardly featured in his sermons, he thought I had lost the plot. “What matters today is the suffering of our brethren under occupation,” he snapped.
In other words: in our Islam we don’t do God, we do Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iraq.
That is not all. This political Islam also has grievances about aspects of British and more broadly European domestic politics. It is unhappy that gays and lesbians are allowed to live without hindrance. It does not like the way women are allowed to “get cheeky” and even argue with their menfolk.
It is scandalised by the West’s “corruption and debauchery” and that there is no “moral force” to set strict limits to individual liberties.
“We have no religious grievances in this country,” said Azam Tamimi, a pro-Hamas British Muslim scholar. “Here we can practise our religion with more freedom than in any Muslim-ruled country. It is therefore natural that we should focus on political rather than religious issues.” […]
Islam cannot have it both ways: pretend to be a religion and demand special respect while operating as a political ideology which, by definition, must be open to criticism and even denigration. […]
Politicised Islam is a form of totalitarianism. Its primary victims are Muslims. In many Muslim countries it has been exposed and can no longer deceive the masses. In the West, however, it has duped media, government and academia into treating it not as a political movement, but as a religion.
Advocates of politicised Islam claim that a call for Islam to return to God, to resuscitate its dead theology and to re-become a religion is nothing but a “Zionist- imperialist plot” to divert “the rage of the Muslim masses”.
More Muslims, however, are beginning to miss God, to feel His absence in their religious discourse and to long for His return where He belongs — at the heart of the faith.
of all groups, never be offended? Is there any other group which has this special never-to-be-offended status? Christians? Hindus? Scientologists? Jews? (ha!) Lesbians? Clowns? Bus Drivers? I can’t come up with any. All the rest of us in this imperfect world have to put up with all sorts of crap that offends us, and we put up with it in the knowledge that we can damn well offend people back. But not, apparently, Muslims – not when it comes to matters concerning their beliefs. And it’s become more and more apparent that there are a great many things about the West that offend them – indeed some, most notably their self-appointed spokesmen, are pretty much full-time professional offence-takers.
And the only reason I can think of why Muslims might be accorded this special status is that a portion of them will resort to threats and violence whenever they’re offended. Simple as that, really.
l at war with Bush, Blair and Berlusconi. It is 50 years this month since that simplistic view of the world lost whatever moral purchase it may once have had. It is time such thinking was, to choose a sadly appropriate word, purged. Too long, my brothers and my sisters, too long.
In the best overview yet of the Danish cartoon affair, Amir Taheri shows the extent to which it’s been a crisis manufactured for precise political ends. Worth reading in full, and noting his conclusion:
The fight between Denmark and its detractors is not between the West and Islam. It is between democracy and a global fascist movement masquerading as religion.
I can see how it must be a problem if you’re learning English. It’s a major part of the language, but it’s not something they teach you in school. How to swear, that is. Where to put the fucking swear words, to add that extra oomph. You don’t want to come across as a wuss and insert the f… word in the fucking wrong place. Like that. It needs to be in the right fucking place.
Anyway, help is at hand, with “English as a Second F*cking Language : How to Swear Effectively” (via).
Let’s hope this book can help avoid embarrassing faux pas, such as in this e-mail received by Paul Belien at Brussels Journal, on the subject of the Danish cartoons:
Dear Sir, Ms
please stop to show mohammad cartoon.
if it’s fredom,so we could attack to your embassy and kill you, then say :it’s freedom!!
you don’t know mohammad,if you knew, you never ever do that.
fuck up mother fucker
Fuck up?? The man (and I think we can assume it’s a man) betrays his lack of class straight away.
[Update: Paul Belien has now removed his post containing the e-mail]
no longer willing or able successfully to compete in the rough and tumble of electoral politics, and enables them to hang on to influence and power long after they have been rejected at the polls; and it acts as a potential fortress against the winds of competition that are now blowing from all over the world, and that are deeply unsettling to people who desire security above all else.
The rest of the article is the usual Dalrymplean gloom about the decline of Europe.