The owner of the France Soir fired the paper's managing editor for reprinting cartoons like the one where Mohamed is telling new suicide bombers "stop, stop, we ran out of virgins!"
The controversy about cartoon images of a deity that even the Koran says was just a man of flesh and blood has rapidly developed into a strategic tool for countering Western intervention in the Muslim world. In a TV program titled "The Islamic Hypocrisy" a Harvard law professor yesterday showed how everyday, countless, deeply offensive anti Christian cartoons fill the Muslim press on a regular basis. Plus today, Tehran announced an international contest for cartoons on (denying) the Nazi Holocaust. Winners will be awarded gold coins, Iranian Embassy in Israel however will not, be burned down as a response. Ayaan Hirsi Ali a former Muslim, and now member of the Dutch Parliament, argued that if Europe doesn't stand up to extremists, a culture of self-censorship and fear of criticizing Islam - one that she says already pervades Holland - will spread across Europe.
Moroccan and Algerian authorities hurried to confiscate not just the France Soir but also some other French publications to prevent their distribution, and the Pakistani Jamaaat-e-Islami party offered five thousand kroner to anyone who killed cartoonists in Denmark.
But when Danish Muslim leaders recently toured the Islamic world with a 43-page report protesting 12 cartoons published by the newspaper Iyllands-Posten last October, they inserted an extra three into the Report for good measure. The extra (invented) cartoons depicted Mohamed as a pedophile and a pigsnout, with a third, portraying a praying Muslim being raped by a dog.
Akhmad Akkari, spokesperson for the Muslim organizations involved in the tour, told The Brussels Journal that the three extra cartoons had been added to “give an insight in how hateful the atmosphere in Denmark is towards Muslims.” The truth – it appears – was considered insufficient by the 21 Danish Muslim organizations protesting the publication of pictures of their prophet, Mohamed.
Although most people have been watching the burning embassies, few people know that it started on Sep 17 2005. That day, Politiken, a Danish newspaper, published an article under the headline "Deep fear of criticism of Islam", detailing the difficulty encountered by the writer Kåre Bluitgen, who had difficulties finding an illustrator for his children’s book on the life of Mohammed. Next this suggestion was taken up by indeed a handful, Danish cartoonists with and another Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, publishing them Sep 30!
The most recent example of Muslim wrath in Europe, as exempliefied by the following interview, was the November 2004 slaying by a militant Muslim of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose documentary about violence against Muslim women contained depictions of Koranic verses.
The issue is about a clash between liberal secularists in the West and Islamists worldwide. It is about their world views on law, ethics, and international relations. The Islamists want to draw the limits of world freedoms and the Western liberals reject that limitation. The Islamists refer to articles of Muslim faith forbidding any drawing of Allah and Prophet Mohammed, let alone satirical ones. And Western liberals say they aren’t bound by any religious law, let alone by fundamentalist interpretations. In normal circumstances, the Danish (turned European) Cartoons hurt the feelings of average Muslims. But the circumstances aren’t normal: They have been modified by the Jihadi international machine and transformed into battlefields from Indonesia to Beirut, from Paris to Copenhagen. Without the Jihadi-organized anti-European intifada worldwide, the crisis would have resembled to other similar ones: When Jesus was depicted in degrading images or other deities insulted across the globe, including the bombing of the Buddha statues by the Taliban, the reactions included protests, letters, flag burning, and the alike. But the Cartoons crisis generated another “type” of reactions: A War against the West led by the Jihadists, claiming that a War against Islam has warranted their Jihad.
The sight of Muslims arguing the need for greater sensitivity among others, and of advocates of laws against racial hatred demanding absolute free speech, is truly marvelous to behold. There is, of course, one minor difference between the two sides: The Muslims are threatening to kill people who offend them and are burning embassies -- in essence, holding entire nations responsible for the actions of a few of their citizens. The European liberals are merely making speeches. They are not threatening to kill critics of the modern secular state. In one sense, there is nothing new or interesting in intellectual inconsistency or dishonesty. Nor is there very much new about Muslims -- threatening to kill people who offend them. What is new is the breadth of the Muslim response and the fact that it is directed obsessively not against the United States, but against European states.
It is dangerous and difficult to speak of the "European position" -- there really isn't one. But for example there was indeed a Franco-German position with previously the view, that, the United States massively overreacted to 9/11. Plus that the United States increased the power of al Qaeda and added unnecessarily to the threat it presents. Implicit in the criticisms -- particularly from the French -- was the view that American cowboy was insensitivity to the Muslim world including excessive support for Israel to support for Egypt and Jordan, thus alienated the Muslims. Now an affair has blown up that not only did not involve the United States, but also did not involve a state decision. The decision to publish the offending cartoons was that of a Danish private citizen. The Islamic response has been to hold the entire state responsible. As the cartoons were republished, it was not the publications printing them that were viewed as responsible, but the states in which they were published. There were attacks on embassies, gunmen in EU offices at Gaza, threats of another 9/11 in Europe (placated during a demonstration in London). European states cannot control what private publications publish. That means that, like it or not, they are hostage to Islamic perceptions. The threat, therefore, is not under their control.
And thus, even if the actions or policies of the United States did precipitate 9/11, the Europeans are no more immune to the threat than the Americans are.This combines with the Paris riots last November and the generally deteriorating relationships between Muslims in Europe and the dominant populations. The pictures of demonstrators in London, threatening the city with another 9/11, touch extremely sensitive nerves. It becomes increasingly difficult for Europeans to distinguish between their own relationship with the Islamic world and the American relationship with the Islamic world. A sense of shared fate emerges, driving the Americans and Europeans closer together.
At a time when pressing issues like Iranian nuclear weapons are on the table, this increases Washington's freedom of action. Put another way, the Muslim strategy of splitting the United States and Europe -- and using Europe to constrain the United States -- was heavily damaged by the Muslim response to the cartoons. Another case in point is the violence against Danish and Norwegian diplomatic offices in Syria (and later, in Lebanon and Iran) -- which undoubtedly occurred with Syrian government involvement. Syria is ruled by Alawites, a Shiite sect. Syria -- aligned with Iran -- is home to a major Sunni community; there is another in Lebanon. The cartoons provided what was essentially a secular regime the opportunity to take the lead in a religious matter, by permitting the attacks on the embassies. This helped consolidate the regime's position, however temporarily. Although often rivals before suddenly, the Sunni and Shiite communities appear to be competing with each other as to which is more offended. The Shiite Iranian-Syrian bloc has taken the lead in violence, but the Sunni community has been quite vigorous as well. The cartoons are being turned into a test of authenticity for Muslims.
To the degree that Muslims are prepared to tolerate or even move past this issue, they are being attacked as being willing to tolerate the Prophet's defamation. The cartoons are forcing a radicalization of parts of the Muslim community that are uneasy with the passions of the moment.Thus, there are two clear beneficiaries. One is the United States: The cartoon affair is serving to further narrow the rift between the Bush administration's view of the Islamic world and that of many Europeans. Between the Paris riots last year, the religiously motivated murder of a Dutch filmmaker and the "blame Denmark" campaign, European patience is wearing thin. The other beneficiary is Iran. As Iran moves toward a confrontation with the United States over nuclear weapons, this helps to rally the Muslim world to its side: Iran wants to be viewed as the defender of Islam, and Sunnis who have raised questions about its flirtations with the United States in Iraq are now seeing Iran as the leader in outrage against Europe.
Plus, the timing seems rather suspect, four long months after the caricatures’ first appearance. Iran therefore might become more verbal, in an attempt to neutralize an anti-nuclear weapons Europe that was ready to help in the American-Israeli diplomatic and military showdown with Iran over that country’s ongoing efforts to acquire a nuclear arsenal. In fact rumors are already made to circulate in Iran that the publication of cartoons in Denmark, is in fact, a Zionist plot.
For more of the plot, see.
Unlike Latino immigrants to the United Sates for example, who largely aspire to participate in the American dream, many Muslims see no reason to integrate into the European societies in which they find themselves -- and most Europeans do not want them to anyway. The result is an ever-building pressure that sooner or later will result in a train crash between the seemingly intractable forces of European identity and Muslim demography. In the past, Europe has dealt with similar issues of a minority's excessive influence in the ruling ethnicity's collective mind. These chapters are not among the proudest of European history.
What is notable
is neither the Muslim outrage nor the European media counteroutrage, but
the fact that Europe has remained so calm for so long.
And like I
already mentioned the aim of militant Islamic groups is to overthrow democracy
and establish a Taliban-style Islamic government. In order to create the
conditions necessary for revolution, they believe they need to foment civil
unrest (see).
