Civilization Versus Barbarians

So the Boston Globe also advocates sensitivity to the rioting Muslims. Again, let's just keep in mind what we're talking about. We supposedly need sensitivity to people like this:



Um... I don't think so. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for sensitivity, and think that anyone who would draw or publish cartoons about Muhammad should consider the reception those drawings will have in the Islamic world.

Be that as it may, this is not about insensitivity. As Instapundit puts it, this is about civilization versus barbarism. A call for people's death because of a drawing or a book has no place in a civilized world.

Just recently in this country, Entertainment Weekly Rolling Stone magazine ran a cover with rapper Kanye West decked out as Jesus Christ. I'm sure many Christians were offended by this. I sure was. But I don't recall any protests outside Time-Warner company headquarters, particularly any with placards calling for company executives to be beheaded or otherwise executed. Fundamentalist Christians protested the airing of the TV show Book of Daniel, again without calls for ABC executives to be murdered. Several years ago, Christians protested vigorously against selling a photograph of a crucifix lying in a pool of urine, yet again without resorting to death threats. (Of course, the papers like The Globe would typically condemn these types of protests as being intolerant and backward. No need for sensitivity there.)

Yet, the Globe's response to calls for beheadings is to simply call for sensitivity and to condemn those who would be so offensive. Ironically, the Globe called things as they were just last year, after the Qu'ran desecration riots.

No one recalled, for example, that American Catholics lashed out in violent rampages in 1989, after photographer Andres Serrano's ''Piss Christ" -- a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine -- was included in an exhibition subsidized by the National Endowment for the Arts. Or that they rioted in 1992 when singer Sinead O'Connor, appearing on ''Saturday Night Live," ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II.

There was no reminder that Jewish communities erupted in lethal violence in 2000, after Arabs demolished Joseph's Tomb, torching the ancient shrine and murdering a young rabbi who tried to save a Torah. And nobody noted that Buddhists went on a killing spree in 2001 in response to the destruction of two priceless, 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha by the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

Of course, there was a good reason all these bloody protests went unremembered in the coverage of the Newsweek affair: They never occurred.

Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don't lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted. They don't call for holy war and riot in the streets. It would be unthinkable for a mainstream priest, rabbi, or lama to demand that a blasphemer be slain. But when Reuters reported what Mohammad Hanif, the imam of a Muslim seminary in Pakistan, said about the alleged Koran-flushers -- ''They should be hung. They should be killed in public so that no one can dare to insult Islam and its sacred symbols" -- was any reader surprised?

The Muslim riots should have been met by outrage and condemnation. From every part of the civilized world should have come denunciations of those who would react to the supposed destruction of a book with brutal threats and the slaughter of 17 innocent people. But the chorus of condemnation was directed not at the killers and the fanatics who incited them, but at Newsweek.

(emphasis mine) What's changed? This new round of protests should meet with no less outrage and condemnation from the West as those last year.

To those protesting, I have to ask, who is the greater insult to your faith? The cartoonist who links your prophet with terrorist bombings or the terrorists whose actions make such an association something to be pointed out? By calling for holy war and the deaths of those who publish these cartoons, you are proving the point the cartoons are trying to make. As the Globe pointed out last year,

what disgraces Islam above all is the vast majority of the planet's Muslims saying nothing and doing nothing about the jihadist cancer eating away at their religion. It is Free Muslims Against Terrorism, a pro-democracy organization, calling on Muslims and Middle Easterners to ''converge on our nation's capital for a rally against terrorism" -- and having only 50 people show up.

Yes, Islam is disrespected. That will only change when throngs of passionate Muslims show up for rallies against terrorism, and when rabble-rousers trying to gin up a riot over a defiled Koran [or a drawing in a newspaper] can't get the time of day.

Will the Arab world join the ranks of civilized nations, or continue in the way of barbarism?