Mohammed Overcome by the Fundamentalists
(Balloon:) “It’s a Drag Being Loved By Idiots”

Left-Wing French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo sided with Liberté in its latest issue, publishing the Danish cartoons and an addition (above) of its own.

Cox & Forkum comment on the spineless response of the generality of the MSM to the Cartoon Jihad.

I’m from Pennsylvania and I’m proud that my old regional newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, published at least one of the Danish cartoons, when the yellow-bellied, hypocritical, National Security-betraying, so-called paper of record, the New York Times, would not. Good work, Inquirer!

Remember what Henry David Thoreau said. Read not the Times; read the eternities.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Sonia Mikich demands an apology:

I feel offended.

Zealots are nailing veils onto the faces of my sisters in Afghanistan and Pakistan and are busy hanging women, homosexuals, adulterers and non-believers…

I demand that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Indonesia and Egypt apologise to me. Otherwise I am unfortunately forced to threaten, beat up, kidnap or behead their citizens. Because I am somewhat sensitive about my cultural identity.

I feel offended.

Fanatics are blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, marvellous cultural monuments…

I demand that Hamas, the spokesman of the French Muslims and the Director of the Al-Azhar-University apologise to me. Otherwise I will never spend a holiday at the Taj Mahal, I will call for a boycott of Palestinian fruit and I will set the embassies of Tunisia, Qatar and Bangladesh on fire…

I expect understanding for this at the very least — my feelings are absolute and must be expressed globally.

I feel offended.

Videos show journalists, truck drivers and NGO workers having their throats slit or their heads chopped off. Jews see themselves represented as cannibals and pigs, Western women as decadent sluts. Apolitical engineers have to fear for their lives.

All in the name of God.

I demand that all the editors in chief of newspapers and television broadcasters in the Islamic world apologise to me, because they do nothing to prevent these obscenities.

Jeff Goldstein notes that Islamic sources are successfully applying the language and tactics of the Western left to brand Danish protesters proposing to retaliate for the widespread Islamic burning of Danish flags, and the burning of two Danish embassies, by publicly burning the Koran as “racists” and “extremists,” while simultaneously depicting violent Muslim demonstrators as “offended victims.” Western political correctness is being successfully assimilated to the Islamic claim to privileged immunity to mockery or criticism.

This battle over the Danish cartoons highlights all of these philosophical dilemmas (which I have argued previously are the result of certain linguistic misunderstandings that are either cynically or idealistically perpetuated); and so we are brought to the point where this clash of civilizations—which in one important sense is a clash between theocratic Islamism and the west, but in another, more crucial sense, is a clash between the west and its own structural thinking, brought on by years of insinuation into our philosophy of what is, at root, collectivist thought that privileges the interpreter of an action over the necessary primacy of intent and agency and personal responsibility to the communicative chain—could conceivably become manifest over something so seemingly trivial as the right to satirize.

An Arab News columnist rejoices in the power of the Islamic and Arab worlds to bring a Western nation virtually to its knees.

————————————————————————-

Mark Steyn wonders where all those Danish flags came from:

I long ago lost count of the number of times I’ve switched on the TV and seen crazy guys jumping up and down in the street, torching the Stars and Stripes and yelling ”Death to the Great Satan!” Or torching the Union Jack and yelling ”Death to the Original If Now Somewhat Arthritic And Semi-Retired Satan!” But I never thought I’d switch on the TV and see the excitable young lads jumping up and down in Jakarta, Lahore, Aden, Hebron, etc., etc., torching the flag of Denmark.

Denmark! Even if you were overcome with a sudden urge to burn the Danish flag, where do you get one in a hurry in Gaza? Well, OK, that’s easy: the nearest European Union Humanitarian Aid and Intifada-Funding Branch Office. But where do you get one in an obscure town on the Punjabi plain on a Thursday afternoon? If I had a sudden yen to burn the Yemeni or Sudanese flag on my village green, I haven’t a clue how I’d get hold of one in this part of New Hampshire. Say what you like about the Islamic world, but they show tremendous initiative and energy and inventiveness, at least when it comes to threatening death to the infidels every 48 hours for one perceived offense or another. If only it could be channeled into, say, a small software company, what an economy they’d have.

and cautions on the limits of sensitivity to one’s adversary’s point of view:

One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there’s very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and Sharia. As a famously sensitive Dane once put it, “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

————————————————————————-

Charles Moore at the Telegraph also remarks upon those flags:

It’s some time since I visited Palestine, so I may be out of date, but I don’t remember seeing many Danish flags on sale there. Not much demand, I suppose. I raise the question because, as soon as the row about the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten broke, angry Muslims popped up in Gaza City, and many other places, well supplied with Danish flags ready to burn. (In doing so, by the way, they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but let that pass.)

Why were those Danish flags to hand? Who built up the stockpile so that they could be quickly dragged out right across the Muslim world and burnt where television cameras would come and look? The more you study this story of “spontaneous” Muslim rage, the odder it seems.

The complained-of cartoons first appeared in October; they have provoked such fury only now. As reported in this newspaper yesterday, it turns out that a group of Danish imams circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries. When they did so, they included in their package three other, much more offensive cartoons which had not appeared in Jyllands-Posten but were lumped together so that many thought they had.

It rather looks as if the anger with which all Muslims are said to be burning needed some pretty determined stoking.

————————————————————————-

And Matthew Paris in the London Times opines: So they have thin skins. That shouldn’t stop us poking fun at them.

Mohammed in Hell, Giovanni da Modena, Church of St. Petronio, Bologna, c. 1420

Zombietime, the useful site which collects images of domestic moonbat demonstrations, has added (in response to recent events) a collection of images of the historic moonbat Mohammed, including the three forged cartoons added to the far-too-bland original Danish twelve by the Islamic agitators who engineered the recent rioting.

Hat tip to Mark in Mexico.

The Islamic position:

Syrian demonstrators invaded the Danish Embassy in Damascus and set fire to the building. In Gaza, protesters burned Danish flags chanting “Death to Denmark,” and gunmen stormed the European Union office. Radical Islamists pronounced a fatwa against the 500-strong Danish garrison in southern Iraq. In Kashmir, shops closed in protest. Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami party offered a bounty of 50,000 Danish kroner for the murder of the Danish cartoonists. Jihadi websites are calling for suicide bombings in Denmark. Hezbollah’s head, Hassan Nasrallah, declared if Muslims had carried “out the fatwa of Imam Khomeini against the renegade Salman Rushdie, the scum who are insulting our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway, and France would not dare do so.” In a mosque in Ramallah inside the Palestinian territories, protesters shouted, “Bin Laden our beloved, Denmark must be blown up.” In Nablus, Hassan Sharaf, an imam at a local mosque told worshippers at his sermon “If they want a war of religions, we are ready.'”

The Western elites’ response:

The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, former Supreme Court of Canada justice Louise Arbour, announced: “I find alarming any behaviors that disregard the beliefs of others,” and launched investigations into “racism” and “disrespect for belief,” and asked for “an official explanation” from the Danish government.

In its first official comments on the caricatures, the Vatican, while deploring violent protests, said certain forms of criticism represent an “unacceptable provocation.” “The right to freedom of thought and expression … cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers,” the Vatican said in a statement.

Major American newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, refused to publish the cartoons.

British Foreign Minister Jack Straw criticized newspapers that published the drawings. And State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper declared: “These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims… We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable.”

They may be ready for a war between religions and civilizations, but we are going to need different leadership before we are.

Charles Martel defeats a considerably larger Saracen Army at the Battle of Tours, October 10, 732 .

The West used to have better leadership.

Michelle Malkin sat up late last night putting together this video commentary:

First, They Came

As far as I am concerned, they can pound sand.

says Zeus to Mohammed in the France Soir cartoon, which ran today, after its managing editor Jacques Lefranc was fired by Raymond Lakah, the paper’s Franco-Egyptian owner for publishing the twelve Prophet Mohammed cartoons from Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten. Erik at ¡No Pasar¡n! is covering the European response.

—————————–
BBC

—————————–

It did seem strange that the controversy over the rather bland Danish cartoons should break out again so vigorously recently in Islamic countries and Islamic European communities. Counterterrorism Blog explains how this came about.