Freedom of Speech for Them but Not for Us

Charles Krauthammer has it just right in his column on the Western intellectuals' and journalists' reaction to the "studied frenzy over the Danish Muhammed cartoons" in the Muslim world. Krauthammer makes the point that Western self-styled "moderates" are not being evenhanded when they endorse the principle of free expression while "they criticize the Danish newspaper for abusing that right by publishing offensive cartoons, and they declare themselves opposed, in the name of religious sensitivity, to doing the same."

In refusing to republish the cartoons, the Western media are giving in to a mob:

The mob is trying to dictate to Western newspapers, indeed Western governments, what is a legitimate subject for discussion and caricature. The cartoons do not begin to approach the artistic level of Salman Rushdie's prose, but that's not the point. The point is who decides what can be said and what can be drawn within the precincts of what we quaintly think of as the free world.

Krauthammer points out that the Western press and intellectuals have shown no sympathy whatever when Western leftists have created works openly insulting Christianity. You can easily find photos of "Piss Christ," a so-called art exhibition that explicitly did just that. When Christians are being attacked, the Western pseudointelligentsia and their journalistic catamites stick their fingers in their ears and shout "freedom of the press!!!!"

But when it is Islam being insulted, suddenly freedom of the press is less important than sensitivity. But why are the the intellectuals and their bag carriers so concerned about the sensitivities of alien people living thousands of miles away in self-created nightmare conditions when these same self-styled Western eminences are so unmoved by the concerns of their Christian neighbors? (Those same neighbors whose principles led to the modern idea of freedom of the press, incidentally.) Westerners who praise the Islamic "moderates" who are asking the mobs to quiet down, the Western press are, in Krauthammer's apt phrase, endorsing the goals of the mob while not endorsing the means:

What passes for moderation in the Islamic community -- "I share your rage but don't torch that embassy" -- is nothing of the sort. It is simply a cynical way to endorse the goals of the mob without endorsing its means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is interested only in this instance of religious insensitivity.

Have any of these "moderates" ever protested the grotesque caricatures of Christians and, most especially, Jews that are broadcast throughout the Middle East on a daily basis? The sermons on Palestinian TV that refer to Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys? The Syrian prime-time TV series that shows rabbis slaughtering a gentile boy to ritually consume his blood? The 41-part (!) series on Egyptian TV based on that anti-Semitic czarist forgery (and inspiration of the Nazis), "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," showing the Jews to be engaged in a century-old conspiracy to control the world?

A true Muslim moderate is one who protests desecrations of all faiths. Those who don't are not moderates but hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, merely using different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West.

Krauthammer says, "What is at issue is fear. The unspoken reason many newspapers do not want to republish is not sensitivity but simple fear. They know what happened to Theo van Gogh, who made a film about the Islamic treatment of women and got a knife through the chest with an Islamist manifesto attached." The Westerners' sensitivity, he says, is simply an attempt to keep the Islamic hordes' anger concentrated on the Danes and the few other European newspapers that reprinted the cartoons.

I believe that the level of fear is an important element, however. The Western intellectuals certainly fear Islam, but the threat appears quite distant and attenuated at this time, so they believe that they can dismiss Islamic rage as no real, immediate threat. They figure, if radical Muslims do anything really bad to us, as they did five years ago, we can always get behind our government in a concerted response as we did then, while the fear-adrenaline was still coursing through our veins. That should stop the problem. Plus, most Muslims are moderate and really don't want to kill us, and they certainly don't want to get bombed and crushed under Westerners' tanks because of a few big-mouthed religious fanatics in their midst. We can count on their good sense to stop the radicals among them, and if that fails, our government will step in and threaten the bad guys with serious retaliation, at which point they will retreat with their tails between their legs and resume murdering people in Indonesia, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Africa, and other places that don't affect us.

In short, they believe, Islam is a threat, but a distant and easily defeatable one.

Christians and believing Jews, by contrast, are all around us, the Western psuedointelligentsia observes, and these particular religious fanatics pose an immediate threat to our freedom. These lunatics want to force us to have replicas of the Ten Commandments on our courthouse lawns, to hear people pray in our forcibly tax-supported schools, to have voters (instead of the Supreme Court) decide what a human life is and how it should be protected, to teach children that Darwin's theory is just a theory, and other such instances of their repulsive Western version of Sharia law.

Those people must be stopped, and any way we can undermine their faith is a very good thing indeed, think the Western intellectuals and their lapdogs in the media. That is why there is this disconnect between the Western press's treatment of Islam and its attitude toward Christianity and Judaism.