Jihad in Denmark

The MSM has been giving little if any coverage to the flap over a series of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed that have been run in a Danish newspaper and rerun in Norwegian media as well. The Islamofascists, of course, as well as their friends in the "street" are in a high dudgeon, demanding apologies, lobbing death threats, the usual. The Danish newspaper issued a tepid "apology" and the Norwegian government is actually trying to appease these thugs.

But, as usual, the U.N. takes it one better:

Responding to a complaint by the Organization of Islamic Conferences (OIC) over twelve caricatures of the prophet Muhammad published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten last September, Louise Arbour - United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights - has appointed two UN experts on racism to carry out a detailed investigation into what Arbour characterizes as a “disrespect for belief.”

Leave it to the U.N. to set things right!! Just like they did with the Oil for Food scandal. We're wondering why they didn't investigate the Piss Christ and Elephant Dung Virgin Mary scandals in the U.S. over the last few years, but then again, that's only those superstitious Christians bitching, and we all know about them.

This issue, unfortunately, is a bit more complex than it might seem, which is why you can't leave it to the corrupt and simplistic idiots in the U.N. to deal with it. In democracies, you have, at times, a serious confrontation between the right to free speech and the seemingly more esoteric matters of respect and good taste. The far left in this country in particular, but in Europe as well, has made a fetish out of trashing Christianity as part of their Gramscian effort to exterminate organized religion as a force to be reckoned with in contemporary Western society. Christians, particularly in this country, have fought back hard and the tide is turning, but it has by no means turned.

A civilized society tries to strike a balance between freedom of speech, which must be honored, and malicious attempts to damage others, which need not be honored at all. We seem, however, to have lost this distinction when it comes to organized religion, which is regularly offended in this country.

While you can't exactly shut blasphemers up, you can deny public funding for their art, refuse to exhibit them, refuse to award them prizes, and essentially deny them endorsements and monetary rewards for their obnoxious, anti-social behavior. They'll either get the message or remain incorrigible at their own risk and expense. They have chosen freely to participate provocatively in the world of ideas, and in the end and must be allowed to say their piece. But once they have done so, we're under no obligation to agree with them or to support them in any way. If we shower cultural misfits like these with death threats, however, we are committing acts that are even worse than the provocation.

We can easily see how a devout, non-violent Muslim could get torqued off by the content of these cartoons, but that doesn't justify the usual insane violence that the extreme Islamofascists are more than ready to whip up at the least provocation. It also doesn't justify their lack of respect for countries in which they are, effectively, guests. I wonder what would happen to me if I started praying the Stations of the Cross in Mecca. It works both ways.

Christ famously advised those who were testing him politically that people should "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." Good advice. But, unfortunately, from the New Testament, not the Koran.

There's no solution to this problem for now. Muslims have to learn that to enjoy the fruits of democratic government, they're going to have to learn a bit of tolerance for the views of others, at least in the public sphere. They also have to understand that cartoons like the Danish caricatures don't exist in a vacuum. Adherents of Islam have allowed the violent to bear it away. They shouldn't be surprised that—after the subway attacks in Spain and the UK, the Islamic violence in France, the casual gang raping of non-Muslim women in Europe by Islamofascist thugs, and the countless grisly beheadings in Iraq—Westerners should view their religion as inherently violent, remorseless, and entirely intolerant. Until they gain the capability to look deeply within their own souls and motivations, such people are doomed to remaining on the fringes of civilized, democratic society as it is currently defined and understood.

But the West, on the other hand, is going to have to realize that they have reached a dead end in their headlong pursuit of nihilism and moral relativism. A democracy must tolerate reasonable yet differing points of view. But it also has no obligation to endorse those that will lead to an erosion of the society that they have achieved. The West will be able to counter radical Islamofascism only when it reconnects to its own Judaeo-Christian democratic roots, regaining at last the moral authority it lost when it established godless Marxism as its secular state religion.