It was wackos who attacked New York, and wackos who bombed Madrid; it is a group of wackos in green scarves who keep blowing people up in Israel. A few bad apples shouldn’t give a bad name to Arabs or to Muslims because they are the extremists, not the moderate majority, right?
Then again, the wackos in green just won a strong parliamentary majority in Palestine. It seems that at least 44 percent of voting Palestinians strongly identify themselves with people who believe the sword is mightier than the pen, and a rocket-propelled grenade mightier still.
And what about the Danish embassies in Damascus and Beirut? That was a whole crowd of wackos burning them down last week, and a bunch more rampaging in Pakistan, burning down western stores and storming a democratic enclave. There seemed to be oceans of them in Afghanistan attacking the U.S. bases, and we already cleaned the wackos out of that country, didn’t we? In fact, it seems like there are too many people involved for them all to be wackos. Then what are they?
Liberal dogma is defined by constitutions that protect personal liberties and choices above all else. It generally dictates that people live by their own individual choices and let others live by theirs; each is entitled to his opinion. That attitude makes it difficult to judge other cultures as better or worse, since diversity of approaches and ideas are at least ostensibly valued in ours.
But many Muslims have called for amputation of cartoonists’ hands, Muslims in England carried cards that read, “Behead the enemies of Islam,” and a Muslim coalition has demanded a formal apology from the Danish government for the Mohammad-bashing cartoons that first ran in September in the Jyllands-Posten, an independent Danish newspaper. There is anger in the Muslim world, and it is not just a few crazies that are reacting drastically and violently in the wake of the cartoons’ publication.
People are quick to say that this is not a “Clash of Civilizations,” but I have slowly and reluctantly come to the conclusion that it is. Liberal freedom of expression is pitted against Mohammad’s right to be respected, and I will not hesitate to say that the right to ridicule him is by far the superior. This is a liberal principle that I would never compromise, one of the pillars of the West that keeps it free from oppression.
The Muslim opinion is clearly the opposite. For them to stand by and allow their prophet to be ridiculed as an ill-disguised terrorist is impossible; they wouldn’t be able to respect themselves as devout Muslims if they did. This is not radical.
This causes an impasse. Many Muslims see no reason to back down, and neither do liberals. But the Judeo-Christian West has already lived through the devout stage and it wasn’t pretty. If we followed the tradition of Inquisition-era Christianity, we’d kill Muslims just because they weren’t Christians and shove snakes down the throats of the unenlightened until they screamed their love for Jesus. We would believe that anyone who doesn’t believe in Jesus will go to hell and we would believe that we have a responsibility to eradicate their false beliefs.
And we no longer embrace that brand of Christianity. We sacrificed our hardcore interpretation of religion for the sake of living in peace with one another.
Until recently I assumed that most Muslims had done the same. I thought only extremists with a radical interpretation of Islam were causing the violence in the news, that mainstream Muslims are moderate and want nothing but peace and harmony. The last few days prove to me that it isn’t just the extremists.
Many Muslims in many places erupted into violence this past week, burning embassies in Lebanon and Syria, attacking U.S. bases, beating up Dutchmen mistaken as Danes in Afghanistan and attacking diplomatic enclaves in Pakistan. These are not a few wacko terrorists like those who bombed the subway in London; they are openly committing violence against Western institutions, and their numbers are great. They seem to be your average Muslims who are proud of their prophet, but who have finally realized that violence can be used to get what you want. This is not a lesson that the Danes should reinforce with an apology.
As long as a significant number of Muslims remain the devout, intolerant variety, their world and the liberal West will never get along. Liberalism is a tolerant ideology, but it cannot coexist with a strong religion. Such faith cannot tolerate other ideas, and therefore there will never be peace. A few wackos we can handle, but somebody has to make sacrifices to get along, and I know I’m not giving up the right to say that.
