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Friday, February 03, 2006It's official: Either Muslims are infants or we're condescending jerks.Marcus wrote recently to ask what I thought about no U.S. papers reprinting the cartoons of Muhammad that are causing a stir in Europe. Considering that I've seen, in media, pictures of a crucifix in urine, a fist up an anus and pornographic shots from a website that were ostensibly but not really of U.S. troops raping Iraqi women, I'm appalled by the press' dismal interest in my right to know. I think I should be able to judge for myself whether Muslims have a right to be angry about the cartoons, and how angry. Now the State Department has gotten in on the act. Instapundit notes that at a State Dept. briefing the U.S. all but agreed that Muslims have the right to have their precious eyes shielded. Would anybody ask the same of Christian groups? Of course not. Because Christianity is sufficiently grown up and, dare we say it, civilized, to acknowledge the existence of other views and seek merely a safe space for its adherents to practice their faith. Islam, one must conclude, however, is the province of backward xenophobes that, like growling dogs, are best treated as imbecilic but dangerous. "Nice Islam," we coo, while hoping it will bite someone else. Considering what Bush said in the SOTU about preserving liberty in the face of radicals using Islam as an excuse for totalitarianism, this is an embarrassment. And evidence that State doesn't just need a reformation of the culture, it needs a top-down cleaning out in which it is made clear that they serve the interests of America, not the sensibilities of everyone else. Islam's reaction to the cartoons is an embarrassment, suggesting Mohammed is too small to withstand caricature. The State Department's response is a disgrace, suggesting our freedom of expression is more trivial still. Update: The Mighty Tim Blair and Michelle Malkin, among others, have published all the cartoons on his site. The best one is below:  Lest anyone get the wrong idea, the TurkeyBlog is not anti-Islam. The Koran, he thinks, is about on par with most of the other religious texts out there. In the long run, when the Islamonutters die off and enough of the Muslim world joins the so-called developed nations, Islam will turn out not to have been vastly more destructive than Christianity was at its worst. But for now, we will see the like of the Catholic Christians' sack of Orthodox Constantinople on the way to raising hell in the Holy Land. In time, though, Islam will become a guide for sane and rational people to plot out meaningful and orderly lives - it already does in many cases. As a Christian, I get the occasional atheist railing against my faith as though my beliefs were intertwined with Saint Louis' rampage, the Inquisition, the Crusades and Louis XIV's divine right. One day, Muslims will blush a little and try to explain why the ugly Osama thing wasn't what their belief system was about. Assuming the Feiler Faster bit, we may be less than a hundred years from that time. 
posted by gbarto at 11:50 AM |
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Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
