Augean Stables

Rushdie furore stuns honours committee

· Muslim backlash after knighthood not foreseen
· UK protests over Pakistani minister’s remarks

Duncan Campbell and Julian Borger
Wednesday June 20, 2007
The Guardian

Religious students in Multan, Pakistan, burn effigies of the Queen and Salman Rushdie during protests against the awarding of the knighthood. Photograph: Khalid Tanveer/AP

The committee that recommended Salman Rushdie for a knighthood did not discuss any possible political ramifications and never imagined that the award would provoke the furious response that it has done in parts of the Muslim world, the Guardian has learnt.

It also emerged yesterday that the writers’ organisation that led the lobbying for the author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses to be knighted had originally hoped that the honour would lead to better relations between Britain and Asia.

I can’t help but smile. Just what were they thinking? That we handled Danoongate and the Pope’s Remarks so well that, well, things are “getting better all the time…”? Clearly they didn’t read Dan Pipes, The Rushdie Affair.

The news came as the row spread around the world and the British high commissioner in Islamabad made representations to the Pakistani government over remarks supposedly made by the minister for religious affairs, Mohammed Ejaz ul-Haq, in which he appeared to justify suicide bombings as a response to the award.

Rushdie was celebrating his 60th birthday in London yesterday and is not commenting on the latest threats to his life. It is understood he is anxious not to inflame the situation. Scotland Yard declined to comment as a matter of policy on whether the writer has been given police protection.

The arts and media committee that proposed him for a knighthood is one of eight similar committees that make recommendations to the main committee, which then forwards the final names to the prime minister.

It was chaired by Lord Rothschild, the investment banker and former chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery. The other committee members are Jenny Abramsky, the BBC’s director of radio and music; novelist and poet Ben Okri, who is vice-president of the English chapter of PEN International, which campaigns on behalf of writers who face persecution; Andreas Whittam Smith, former editor of the Independent; John Gross, the author and former theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph; and two permanent secretaries, one from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and one from the Scottish executive.

Watch out for the Elders of Zion.

“Very properly, we were concerned only with merit in relation to the level of the award,” Mr Whittam Smith said yesterday.

He added that it would be for the main committee to assess any other aspects of the honour. The Foreign Office is represented on the main committee by the permanent secretary, whose job it would be to raise any potential international ramifications. A Foreign Office spokesman said he was not aware of any request by the honours committee to gauge likely Muslim reaction to the knighthood before the decision was taken.

PEN International, which campaigned on behalf of Rushdie when he was in hiding during the fatwa years, has lobbied consistently for him to be honoured. Yesterday the director of its London chapter, Jonathan Heawood, said that he was taken aback by the scale of the reaction.

Mr Heawood said it had been felt that an honour for the writer, who was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), would be seen as a positive step in British-Asian relations.

“The honour is for services to literature and a very belated recognition that he is a world writer, who was in the vanguard of a writing tradition that exploded in the 80s in south Asia,” said Mr Heawood.

“It seems a shame that a few lines in his fourth novel should have turned him into this hate figure. He has become a Guy Fawkes figure to be thrown on a bonfire whenever it suits a government to divert attention from what is happening in their own countries.”

Welcome to the global Middle East.

The Pakistani foreign ministry summoned the British high commissioner yesterday to complain about the knighthood, but British officials said they used the occasion to protest about the remarks by Mr Ejaz ul-Haq, who has since said that his comments were a statement of fact and not intended to incite violence.

“The high commissioner, Robert Brinkley, made clear to the Pakistan ministry of foreign affairs the British government’s deep concern about what the minister of religious affairs is reported to have said,” a Foreign Office spokeswoman said. “We made very clear that nothing can justify suicide bomb attacks.”

However, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Kurshid Kasuri, said on a visit to Washington that Britain could not have been surprised by the outrage.

The chairman of the all-party group on Pakistan, the Conservative MP Stewart Jackson, also attacked the decision to knight Rushdie. “We do not need a situation where we are gratuitously offending our allies in the fight against terror,” he told the ePolitix website. “I think the prime minister’s office should think very carefully about that decision.”

No date has been set for the investiture. Two ceremonies are due to take place next month but they are likely to be for those who were named in the New Year’s honours list. Rushdie could become Sir Salman in the next batch of investitures between October and December or early next year.

Watch this empty space in British brains.

The Pope’s recent remarks have set off a particularly revealing firestorm of criticism. Distracted by the Al Durah trial, I haven’t paid close attention until now.

Dismaying is probably putting it mildly. At a distance, one gets the following impression. The Pope expressed disapproval of Jihadi “thinking” in Islam; Muslims the world over expressed vigorous if not violent objection to the Pope’s remarks; and responsible Westerners waxed indignant at the pope’s unnecessary provocation. Under the double pressure of a politically-correct public sphere and a violent or threatening Muslim “street,” the pope apologized.

Of course, the second stage of this story — the Muslim response — is nothing less than a very bad joke. “Call me violent? I’ll show you! I’ll riot and rampage until you stop calling me violent!” This is the kind of silliness even a five-year-old can get.

But the “adults” are not laughing, at least not in public. So what happened?
(more…)

Hat tip David Steinman.
The new issue is not yet on the Harper’s website.

INTERVIEW-US satirist Art Spiegelman tackles Danish cartoons

Tue 16 May 2006 7:15 PM ET
By Claudia Parsons
Reuters

NEW YORK, May 16 (Reuters) - Controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad have been reprinted in a U.S. magazine with commentary by leading U.S. cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who offers what he calls a “fatwa bomb meter” to rate their offensiveness.

Harper’s Magazine published the article by Spiegelman in its June edition available on newsstands from Tuesday, joining only a handful of U.S. outlets which have printed the cartoons which provoked furious protests that killed 50 people.

Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper published the 12 cartoons last year. Other newspapers around the world, mainly in Europe, later reprinted the cartoons.

A number of Muslim clerics have condemned the cartoons and a small minority have called for a violent response. A fatwa is a religious edict in Islam, sometimes equated with a death threat since Iran’s late ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ordered Muslims in 1989 to kill British novelist Salman Rushdie.

In an article headlined “Drawing Blood: Outrageous cartoons and the art of outrage,” Spiegelman, an elder statesman of political satire famous for his New Yorker cartoons, said the cartoons needed to be seen to be understood.

“As a secular Jewish cartoonist living in New York City, I start out with four strikes against me, but I really don’t want any irate Muslims declaring holy war on me,” Spiegelman wrote in the article, describing himself as “a devout coward.”

“It’s not intended to add fuel to any fire,” Spiegelman told Reuters by telephone.

“I think that the tone is the tone of a secular wise-guy cartoonist rather than a scholar, but I wanted to show … what couldn’t be described,” he said, adding that he was surprised that most of his friends had not seen the cartoons.

‘BANAL AND INOFFENSIVE’

Spiegelman noted that the cartoons appear “banal and inoffensive” to secular eyes, revealing a gulf in understanding.

“To my secular eyes it seems like the real insult has been things like Abu Ghraib,” he said, referring to abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

In the article Spiegelman analyzes each of the 12 cartoons for artistic merit and offensiveness, using a rating system of one to four bombs in the “fatwa bomb meter.”

A cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb in his turban, generally cited as the most offensive, received three bombs from Spiegelman, who described it as a “hackneyed” expression of an idea.

His most offensive rating of four bombs went only to a stylized cartoon said to depict five women’s head scarves in a line-drawing made up of Islamic symbols such as the crescent.

He said it had “no redeeming features” and in terms of craftsmanship it “might almost be worth a fatwa.”

“I don’t really even quite understand what it’s a cartoon of, except ‘We don’t like Muslims,’” he told Reuters.

The article criticized all sides in the controversy.

“The Jyllands-Posten — a newspaper with a history of anti-immigrant bias — seemed somewhat disingenuous when it wrapped itself in the mantle of free speech to invite cartoonists to throw pies at the face of Mohammad,” Spiegelman wrote. He said many newspapers reprinted the cartoons to reinforce “their own anti-immigrant or Islamophobic biases.”

But he criticized U.S. news outlets for not showing the cartoons out of what he called “political correctness that smelled of hypocrisy and fear.”

Drawing historical parallels with cartoonists jailed in the past, he said, “I do believe in the right to insult.”

Spiegelman’s only mistake in my opinion seems to be in taking the Muslim reaction as a real measure of their sense of offense: “revealing a gulf in understanding.” It’s not clear just what a gulf is revealed in that reaction, given how it was whipped up by people who slipped three fakes in. As Thomas Scanlon noted on the Hirsi Ali panel, “offense is a dangerous principle to use because it’s so easy to take offense.”

I’m subscribing to Harpers.

Ronald Dworkin, no mean thinker, has an extraordinarily muddled piece on Danoongate in the New York Review of Books.

The British and most of the American press have been right, on balance, not to republish the Danish cartoons that millions of furious Muslims protested against in violent and terrible destruction around the world. Reprinting would very likely have meant—and could still mean—more people killed and more property destroyed.

So we take Muslim violence as a “fact”, like nature, and work around it? One of the things that comes out in the study of cultures of “self-help justice” (feud and vendetta) is that the ground rules demand that retaliation be predictable, regardless of whether the initial damage was done intentionally or not. Any leeway means moving from “realism” to “constructivism” in modern poli sci terms, and then things get messy. Andy Bostom, in a recent lecture on the Armenian genocide as Jihad, explained that the very effort of the Armenians to relieve themselves of their dhimmi status provoked the genocidal rage of the Muslims. The point reminded me of the argument that Christopher Boehm makes in his work on Montenegran tribal feuds. As part of an explanation for the remorseless hostility of every other alpha male to the emergence of a leader, he comments that it makes evolutionary sense as a survival mechanism in that, were any serious leader to arise, the Turks would have exterminated them. Predictability of murderous violence: one of the lynch pins of dhimmi behavior.

It would have caused many British and American Muslims great pain because they would have been told by other Muslims that the publication was intended to show contempt for their religion, and though that perception would in most cases have been inaccurate and unjustified, the pain would nevertheless have been genuine.

This comment strikes me as the quintessence of what’s wrong with the way we think about these issues. British and American (and presumably other European) Muslims will be made to feel bad by other Muslims when they tell them that they’ve been diss’d. Why on earth should people not be expected to feel pain? What kind of infantilization is going on here? Why should we protect them from such “pain,” rather than expect them to reply intelligently to their Muslim brethren, and tell them that their infantile behavior in rioting over these pictures is embarrassing Muslims the world over. Or, better yet, tell them that they’ve been worked into a fever pitch by dishonest Muslims who faked really disgusting pictures of the Prophet to provoke them. Of course, that would be treating the Muslims in Europe as responsible members of the society.

True, readers and viewers who have been following the story might well have wanted to judge the cartoons’ impact, humor, and offensiveness for themselves, and the press might therefore have felt some responsibility to provide that opportunity. But the public does not have a right to read or see whatever it wants no matter what the cost, and the cartoons are in any case widely available on the Internet.

This is amazing. Part of what makes the cartoon scandal such a scandal is how mild the cartoons. One cannot possibly understand just how grotesque the reaction (and the need on the part of the really vicious Imams who stirred the toxic brew four months later to fake really disgusting cartoons) until you’ve seen how mild, respectful, even intimidated most of them are. The very notion that the MSM need not show us these cartoons — or better yet, go to the internet to get them — illustrates what kind of bankruptcy now reigns supreme in the world of our MSM.

Sometimes the press’s self-censorship means the loss of significant information, argument, literature, or art, but not in this case. Not publishing may seem to give a victory to the fanatics and authorities who instigated the violent protests against them and therefore incite them to similar tactics in the future.

Okayyyy…. but is there a “but” coming?

But there is strong evidence that the wave of rioting and destruction—suddenly, four months after the cartoons were first published —was orchestrated by Muslim leaders in Denmark and in the Middle East for larger political reasons. If that analysis is correct, then keeping the issue boiling by fresh republications would actually serve the interests of those responsible and reward their strategies of encouraging violence.

What? The evidence that it was concocted is a reason not to make it a deal of it? I’m at a complete loss here. I would have thought that confronting it was all the more important since the whole row was set off by people intent on intimidating the West. Prof. Dworkin seems to mistake the effects for the goal. He thinks that the Imams wanted to stir up violence and more violence, and anything we do that increases the violence plays into their hands. But what’s far more likely is that the violence is a means to the end of intimidating us. And that is precisely what Dworkin recommends we do: back down.

What’s so bizarre about the article is that Dworkin then goes on to argue on principle that no one should be free from ridicule, especially if they wish to benefit by the rules of the civil society game. But he does so, stumbling every time he deals with Muslims, into a moral relativism that shows a staggering lack of understanding. Take, for example, his handling of the Muslim accusation of “double standard” over the Holocaust:

Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons note that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that Western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands.

The idea that ridiculing the “Religion of Peace” for being mindlessly violent is somehow on a par with Holocaust denial is a moral capitulation of monumental proportions. It is actually a form of Muslim apologetic that fails to make the most basic case for moral thinking.

But in the end, somehow, Dworkin pulls the rabbit out of the hat:

If we want to forbid the police from profiling people who look or dress like Muslims for special searches, for example, we cannot also forbid people from opposing that policy by claiming, in cartoons or otherwise, that Islam is committed to terrorism, however misguided we think that opinion is. Certainly we should criticize the judgment and taste of such people. But religion must observe the principles of democracy, not the other way around. No religion can be permitted to legislate for everyone about what can or cannot be drawn any more than it can legislate about what may or may not be eaten. No one’s religious convictions can be thought to trump the freedom that makes democracy possible.

I didn’t see that coming. I guess the article is a good example of Muslim exceptionalism.

From the Positivist:

I cut the following lines from my concluding essay on the French.

Among these issues [that the French have great difficulty addressing intelligently because of the Israel Derangement Syndrome], we find basic ones — about civil society and tolerance — values the Europeans have apparently not been able to communicate to their immigrants, in part through benign neglect. And as a result, they face a meltdown generation.

I recently attended a panel discussion on Islam and Tolerance. The final question went to the heart of the matter. Free speech and tolerance can only exist where it is possible to offend. If we are dealing, as in the Danish Cartoon Scandal, with so violent and touchy an attitude, then can we argue that the Muslim response represented behavior hostile to a society of free speech?

One of the speakers, a French specialist is European Muslims, commented:

The Muslims in Europe were not really upset because it was blasphemy. No, it was because of the double standard. The European Muslims see laws forbidding Holocaust Denial, see David Irving arrested in Austria, the French Catholics managed to block an ad where 12 women substitute for the apostles… so they look at all this and they get indignant about the double standard.

I was astonished both by his comments and by the number of people nodding their heads vigorously in approval.

The double standard here is that of the Muslims, with their demonizing press, their unrestrained reviling of anyone whom they consider an enemy, and their violent outrage at being criticized. Not to teach this lesson represents a tragically lost “teaching moment.” But to then turn it into an exercise in moral equivalence that serves as a phoney apologetics for the Muslims, compounds the loss.

We really are capable of destroying ourselves through moral stupidity. Especially when demopaths wait eagerly for their turn at the microphone.

Update. Condaleeza Rice ran into the same demopathic game in Britain where “moderate” Muslims complained bitterly about America’s “double standard” in its foreign policy. Now granted, as a diplomat, she can’t just say, “look, we side with democracies against theocracies, with those who measure their violence against those who can’t commit enough violence, with those who want to compromise against those who want it all…”, but is there not something she could have said to at least present these folks with a sense of how the “double-standard” complaint sounds hollow?

Monty Python satirist Terry Gilliam says that what the Muslim world needs is a Muslim version of the “Life of Brian”:

Here’s what Slovenian author Slavoj Zizek says about European atheism and Muslims:

UK columnist Gary Younge is outraged with the fact that “acts of bigotry” are celebrated as bravery , from Larry Summers to the Danish cartoons. What is brave about being on the side of the mighty, he asks.

An Oregan University Student newspaper published an editorial entitled “The Islamic Double Standard”:

Saudi Arabia has recalled its envoy to Denmark in response to the cartoon kerfuffle, blathering about how showing such disrespect for Islam is unacceptable. I would suggest to the Saudi government that if they want me to show their pedophile prophet (yes, Mohammad first had sex with his favorite wife when she was nine and he was in his fifties) any respect, they ought to make it legal to publicly practice my religion in their kingdom. Not executing Muslims who convert to other religions would also be good.

Granted this is inflammatory language. But it hardly registers when compared with the virulent attack on non-Muslims (and Muslim apostates) in the Islamic press.

It predictably elicited howls of protest from Muslim students, one of which, from Nada Mohamed, a 20-year-old junior and the vice president of OSU’s Muslim Student Association, is, I think, especially revealing:

“Tears were flowing out of my eyes as I was reading,” she said. “I felt like somebody was ripping my heart out.”

This highly wrought emotional response is classic honor-shame: “I have been publicly criticized, I find that so unbearable I feel as if my very being is threatened.” Dissing is indeed an existential threat in a culture where public face counts more than anything. And the asymmetry (my feelings are hurt by your pointing out that my co-religionists have a double standard in which we can insult you but you can’t insult us) reflects the classic honor-shame attitude: my tribe right or wrong.

The real question here is, how should civil society, which has managed to transcend such passions, among other things by acknowledging that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and asking people to be as respectful of the feelings of others as they would have others be respectful of theirs, react? By saying,

“I’m sorry your feelings are hurt, but in our culture, people have the right to criticize each other, a right you Muslims take full advantage of. We believe that a) ’sticks and stones can break our bones, but words can never harm us;’ and ‘people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.’ If you are so sensitive that criticism, even harsh criticism is ‘tearing your heart out’ what are you doing to stop your co-religionists from engaging in the kind of inflated rhetoric about Israel and the Nazis which is a form of moral sadism?”

Or by saying: “I’m sorry. What can we do to spare your feelings in the future? Would you like to censor our newspaper so that passages critical of Islam don’t appear and you won’t feel hurt?”

Alas.

LGF has a posting on news item about an graduate student in psychology driving his SUV into a group of randomly selected pedestrians:

Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, 22, from Iran explained that he wanted to

“avenge the deaths or murders of Muslims around the world.”

Whether this is linked to Danoongate, which has had a particular impact on UNC campus is not clear, although it seems more likely the proximate cause of this sudden explosion of random violence, than any recent killings of innocent Muslims by westerners recently. In fact, if anything, one would have thought the latest Muslim on Muslim violence would have him running his SUV into a mosque… not.

Taberi-azar did tell the police “would find things inside his apartment in nearby Carrboro that would shed light on his motives.” So far the police are reticent to elaborate what they’ve found. I suspect that much of the literature is a result of the Pallywood effect — vastly exaggerated casualty figures conveyed by demopaths and their dupes eager to demonize Western society. Will we hear more from the police, or will the details go down the PC hole.

My question? What’s he doing studying psychology, which normally calls for minimal levels of self-awareness? And if this outbreak of violence is related to Danoongate, will we find out? Will we get some serious analysis from campus officials on the problems with allowing terrorist ideologies to spread on campuses under the guise of freedom of speech and legitimate criticisms to be intimidated in the name of “sensitivity to” the (honor-shame) tempers of those so drawn to terrorist violence?

For Theodore Dalrymple the French were the ones who got it right this time:

The difference between an honor-shame culture and a integrity-guilt culture is how low or high the bar that prevents you from responding violently when you’ve been dissed. Honor-shame cultures not only allow, they expect, even require that, if you want to save face, you must shed someone else’s blood for the sake of your honor. Jackie Mason, in his own inimitable fashion, reflects on the vast gap between Jews and Muslims. (Hat tip: Henrietta Diestel)

Why you never hear ‘Muslim jokes’
Jackie Mason

Muslim fundamentalists have decided that even if you never saw or heard of the cartoons, you deserve to be hit with rocks, have your car wrecked andyour embassies destroyed. Ironically, the cartoonists were not insulting Islam; they were satirizing fanaticism. Now the fanatics have decided that there are no laws, limits or boundaries that apply to their behavior. They not only have the right to take your life; they now have the right to rob you of your freedom of expression. Could you picture a Jew killing anybody for such meaningless reasons? If a Jew gets mad he might sneak into your house and steal your Lipitor or he would make a deal with your doctor to lie about your cholesterol number, or just when you have fasted a whole day on Yom Kippur he would sneak into your house and steal all the pastrami sandwiches.

I never saw a Jew going into meaningless fights. That is why you seldom see Jewish football players. A Jew is not going to take a chance in spraining his neck or tearing a ligament in his knee just because he was fighting with somebody about catching a ball. He would rather go to a store and buy another ball and avoid the whole problem. That is why therenare also no Jewish hockey players. Hockey players spend all their timenhitting each other in the mouth with sticks. When Jews saw how Gentiles played hockey, that is how Jews found out that instead of becoming hockeynplayers they would become dentists, and that way they decided to let other people play the game while they found a way to make a profit from it.

Jews are never known to get into unnecessary physical battles. That is why people are never afraid of being attacked by a Jew. Did you ever hear anybody say, ‘Don’t go into that neighbourhood, it is very dangerous, there are a lot of Jews there’? Jews have so long been accustomed to being threatened and persecuted all over the world that they could never dream of creating needless violence anywhere, because they would be grateful to find a place where they are allowed to live in peace.

Meanwhile, the world is reacting with an amazing cowardice. Instead of a collective fury, we are pleading forgiveness and promising not to offend them with any more cartoons. Could anything be more perverted?

On one level, what’s going on in the world community is that people take advantage of Jewish tolerance for criticism, and allow themselves, like Ken Livingstone, to be morally sadistic in comparing Jews to Nazis, but then back off in the face of Muslim hypersensitivity and intolerance to any criticism, and apologize profusely for any offense and suffering their criticism may have caused. So you punish the tolerant and mature and you encourage temper tantrums from the violently intolerant and immature.

As the man says, could anything be more perverted?

Desmond Tutu, the retired Anglican archbishop from South Africa, had something to say about the Danish cartoons:

William J. Bennett and Alan M. Dershowitz on the failure of the US Press regarding the cartoons controversy. First, the double-standard:

Secondly, the intimidation:

Finally, the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

They conclude:

Little Green Footballs posted this:

Daily Tar Heel Now Targeted for Cartoon Jihad

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel is now embroiled in a Krazy Kartoon Kontroversy of their own, after publishing an original cartoon showing a politically correct, balanced and non-violent Mohammed denouncing both Denmark and Islamic protesters: Cartoon for February 9 - Opinion.

The Muslim Students Association is seething.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — The Muslim Students Association at the University of North Carolina on Friday asked the campus’ student newspaper to apologize for publishing an original cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

“The intention of bigotry was clear,” the association wrote in a letter to The Daily Tar Heel. “One must question the DTH’s ethics in advancing a widely protested issue to cause a riot of their own. The MSA not only found this cartoon derogatory but is also shocked at the editor’s allowance of its publication — one that incites hate in the current political and social context.”

Note the aggressive tone of injury: “intention of bigotry clear,” “advancing a widely protested issue to cause a riot of its own… derogatory… incites hate in the current political and social context.”

So let me get this straight. Muslims throw a temper tantrum (”current political and social context”); accuse others of “inciting hate” when they themselves revel in it; and express shock that anyone be allowed to trample their sense of honor and dignity. This is a definitional example of demopathy, or the use of civic/liberal values to which you do not adhere to attack those who do adhere to them. Imagine if the newspaper were to produce a savage denunciation of the Israelis. Can one imagine the Muslim students shouting for its removal, or rather praising its courage?

And the cartoon is really quite gentle. (Indeed it reflects the same sense that most Westerners who believe that Islam is a religion of peace feel about Muhammad: that he can’t possibly have been as immature, hyper-sensitive, and insecure as the Muslims who rampage at the slightest slight.

UPDATE at 2/22/06 12:45:40 pm:

Last year, the Muslim Students Association at UNC-CH succeeded in getting Daily Tar Heel columnist Jillian Bandes fired: lgf: Thoughtcrime at UNC-Chapel Hill.

In other words, demopathy works. Intimidate people with your moral outrage, and you can continue to badger them with impunity.

The sad thing is, these are battles that can be won without weapons, merely by pointing out — gently — the unacceptable hypocrisy of the outrage.

There’s a great site that sells T-Shirts of all kinds. They have three dedicated to the latest cartoon controversy. Very witty, very careful not to transgress the prohibitions of Sharia.

The Muslim blogger Ihsan has approvingly posted a piece from a Muslim cartoonist based in Berkeley, Khalil Bendib, that comments on the Danish Cartoon Scandal (Danoongate). It is a perfect example of moral equivalence.

Much like our British commentator, whose response to this issue is to argue we shouldn’t ban holocaust denial in order to maintain standards of free speech, Bendib and Altaf at Ihsan make an equivalence argument to point out the hypocrisy of the West. As a result, holocaust denial is equated with cartoons critiquing Islam.

The notion that there is an equivalence here, that saying something offensive to Jews and something offensive to Muslims are the same thing seems to lie at the heart of the comment.

Let’s just consider what these commentators want us to entertain as an argument: images that deny the Holocaust, a systematic attempt to exterminate an entire people that managed to murder about 6 million of them, all civilians, is the equivalent of 12 cartoons, many not even critical, that depict the prophet Muhammad. Granted some Muslims feel strongly that Muhammad should not be depicted, but that is a religious commitment that we infidels neither share nor, in a world of freedom, should be asked to share. If Muslims feel that way about Muhammad, or Christians feel that Jesus is the only begotten son of God, that is their beliefs. To say that non-believers cannot deal with these world-historical figures as historical figures, cripples the very mainsprings of modern honest discourse… which may be precisely what’s at work here.

To describe these cartoons as Islamophobic is equally interesting. One of them clearly is afraid of Muslims.

But the hysterical and hypocritical Muslim reaction suggests that “Islamophobia” may be a sane response, not a pathological fear (like Muslim Judeophobia).

Now let’s briefly address the issue of hypocrisy. First there’s the case of the deeply offensive cartoons that permeate Muslim media. One searches in vain for a condemnation of these among either the Ihsan blog or Bendib’s cartoons. Actually Altaf has a post on how the anti-Muslim cartoons are like the Nazi one’s of Der Stuermer, as Europe resurrects its fascist past! Apparently, the injury he feels at the “Islamophobic” cartoons has so blinded him, that when he looks for parallels to Der Stuermer in today’s world, it’s the cartoons insulting Islam, not Islamic cartoons insulting everyone else that catch his eye.

The hypocrisy of supposedly progressive Muslim bloggers and cartoonists (from Berkeley no less!) who invoke moral equivalence to condemn something that their fellow Muslims do on a terrifying scale, needs to be considered when we then deal with the two issues they wish to equate: cartoons criticizing the Muslims and Holocaust denial. European countries have outlawed Holocaust denial because they want to hold on to the sobering sanity that hit them all when, in 1945, they took cognizance of the results of Nazi madness. Whether this legal prohibition is a good idea from the perspective of civil society or not, is up fo