Whoops, what a giveaway.

It turns out that the Danish cartoons were republished on the front page of the Egyptian newspaper al Fagr back in October. Did the editor of al Fagr get death threats? Did mobs ransack the world for Egyptians to kidnap in revenge? Were there enraged demonstrations in Egypt at this insult to Islam? Of course not. There wasn’t so much as a peep of protest. But when various European newspapers republished them, there was global insurrection. That’s because, contrary to the cultural cringe from much of the British media and the man of straw in the British Foreign Office, this uproar isn’t about insulting the religion at all. It’s a put up job by the jihadis.

Amir Taheri has sussed the whole thing in the New York Post – a view that seems to be shared, incidentally, by Condoleezza Rice. According to Taheri, the attempt by the Danish imams to use the cartoons to whip up anti-Danish feeling – amplified by their inclusion of three obscene cartoons of the Prophet which they appear to have passed off falsely as having been published by Jyllands Posten in order to further inflame passions – found a particularly receptive audience in Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, that well known moderate Muslim Brother beloved of Ken Livingstone, the Metropolitan Police and the British establishment, and who delivered a (false) theological imprimatur for world-wide protest. And then Iran and Syria spotted an opening:

For Denmark is set to assume the rotating presidency of the U.N. Security Council — at the very time that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is expected to refer Iran to the Security Council and demand sanctions. What better, for Tehran's purposes, than to portray Denmark as ‘an enemy of Islam’ and mobilize Muslim sympathy against the Security Council? To regain the initiative from the Sunni-Salafi groups, Ahmadinejad quickly ordered a severing of commercial ties with Denmark, thus portraying the Islamic Republic as the Muslim world’s leader in the anti-Danish campaign.

Syria was next to jump on the bandwagon, again for mercenary reasons. The United Nations wants Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and five of his relatives and aides, including his younger brother, for questioning in the murder of Lebanon's former premier, Rafiq al-Hariri. (Assad has tried to negotiate immunity for himself and his brother in exchange for handing over the others — but the U.N. wouldn't play.) As with Iran’s nuclear program, the Syrian dossier will reach the Security Council under Danish presidency. To portray Denmark as ‘an enemy of the Prophet’ would not be such a bad thing when the council, as expected, points the finger at Assad and his regime as responsible for a series of political murders, including that of Hariri.

The Danish-cartoons cow will also be milked in another way: Tehran and Damascus have launched a diplomatic campaign to put the issue of ‘protecting religions against blasphemy’ on the Security Council agenda. If that were to happen, issues such as Iran's quest for the atomic bomb and Syria's murder machine in Lebanon might be pushed aside, at least as far as world public opinion is concerned. People watching TV news may think that the whole Muslim world is ablaze with righteous rage translated into ‘spontaneous demonstrations.’ The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, even if offended by cartoons which they have not seen, have stayed away from the street shows put on by the radicals and the Iranian and Syrian security services.

In Britain, the street shows are set to continue. Two more massive Muslim demonstrations are planned. Today’s newspapers dumbly fell for the spin and dutifully reported that these would be organised by ‘moderate’ Muslims. as opposed to the mob that demanded murder and bombings last weekend. These ‘moderates’ are the ‘moderate’ Muslim Council of Britain, who moderately boycott Holocaust Day, moderately back the Jew-hating, gay-hating, human-bombs-in-Israel-and-Iraq-supporting Qaradawi and moderately want to criminalise anyone who even talks about Islamic terrorism; and the Muslim Association of Britain, the British arm of the ‘moderate’ Muslim Brotherhood whose offshoots are busy terrorising Iraq and Israel and are a principal ideological core of the jihad against the west.

This show of force on Britain’s streets will put muscle behind the ‘moderate’ demand by 300 ‘moderate’ Islamic religious leaders who want the law to be changed and the Press Complaints Commission code of conduct to be tightened to stop the publication of any images of the prophet Mohammed. Not only is this a demand for special treatment, not only is it an attempt to bludgeon Britain into censoring speech about Islam, it is also – according to Amir Taheri again, this time in the Wall Street Journal -- based not on religion but on political extremism:

The Muslim Brotherhood's position, put by one of its younger militants, Tariq Ramadan -- who is, strangely enough, also an adviser to the British Home Secretary -- can be summed up as follows: It is against Islamic principles to represent by imagery not only Muhammad but all the prophets of Islam; and the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. Both claims, however, are false. There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else...Many portraits of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers...

Now to the second claim, that the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. That is true if we restrict the Muslim world to the Brotherhood and its siblings in the Salafist movement, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda. But these are all political organizations masquerading as religious ones. They are not the sole representatives of Islam just as the Nazi party was not the sole representative of German culture. Their attempt at portraying Islam as a sullen culture that lacks a sense of humor is part of the same discourse that claims ‘suicide-martyrdom’ as the highest goal for all true believers. The truth is that Islam has always had a sense of humor and has never called for chopping heads as the answer to satirists. Muhammad himself pardoned a famous Meccan poet who had lampooned him for more than a decade. Both Arabic and Persian literature, the two great literatures of Islam, are full of examples of ‘laughing at religion,’ at times to the point of irreverence.

John O’Sullivan sums it all up well on National Review Online:

Suppose both sides listen to these calls for restraint. What would happen? I suppose that one side would stop burning embassies and murdering people and the other side would no longer publish cartoons to which the murderers might object. That would mean the murderers had obtained their objective and the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons had been defeated in its campaign against the unofficial Islamist censorship that in recent years has spread across Europe by murder and intimidation. For, contrary to much ‘responsible’ commentary, Jyllands-Posten, the small regional Danish newspaper that first published the caricatures of Mohammed, did not do so from trivial motives. This was not the kind of avant garde ‘shock’ tactics on show in Piss Christ or in the Sensations exhibition in Brooklyn that included a painting of the Virgin Mary splattered with elephant dung. It was a serious and justified protest against the fact that Danish artists had been frightened out of illustrating a children's book on Islam and Mohammed.

They feared for their lives — and their fear was reasonable. In Holland only last year the filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a radical Islamist for his semi-pornographic film criticizing Islam as hostile to women. His collaborator, the Somali-Dutch feminist MP, Ayaab Hirsi Ali, is now under permanent police protection since radical Islamist terrorists have threatened to kill her too. And murderous intimidation of this kind is now not uncommon in Western Europe. Nor were the Danish cartoons all as crude and pointless as some critics have alleged in their earnest search for reasons to hold "both sides" guilty. One cartoon shows the Prophet with his turban evolving into a bomb. Insulting? Maybe. Blasphemous? Perhaps. Or maybe a perfectly fair comment on the arguments of radical Islamists that their religion justifies the murder of innocent bystanders, on the subsidies that Muslim governments give to suicide bombers, and on the thousands of Muslims baying for blood (and occasionally obtaining it) in response to a caricature. Three cartoons were, indeed, more harsh and insulting than the rest. But these had not been published originally in Jyllands-Posten. They were added by the radical Islamists who distributed the cartoons around the Muslim world. These men committed the very blasphemies that they now use as an excuse for attacks on Danes and Christians.

Vile though it is, this trickery by radical Islamists at least demonstrates the uselessness of appeasing their demands for censorship. If they are granted, our concessions will merely be the springboard for a further attack on Western liberty. And if we disobligingly refuse to furnish them with a pretext, the Islamists will manufacture one as Hitler used to manufacture border incidents in order to justify his planned aggressions. So we might as well fight in the first ditch rather than the last.

Alas – in Britain the ditch is pretty sparsely peopled right now.

Posted by melanie at February 9, 2006