Civitas

What the Danish paper was testing was the weakness of free societies in the face of intimidation by militant Islam. But it wasn’t actually the cartoons that proved their point, it was a group of Danish imams. The cartoons were published, to no great furore, six months before the explosion. The fuse was lit by the clerics who paraded the cartoons around the Middle East – with a few of their own choice masterpieces thrown in for good measure. The intention was to stir up anger. The result: success. It’s worth remembering, for a second, that the issue of representing the Prophet has been – again, for very specific purposes – blown out of proportion. Quite apart from the fact that Christians are used to seeing Christ as a transvestite or His mother Mary dressed as a whore – this is the work of ‘brave’ artists like of Gilbert and George – there have always been caricatures of Mohammed in Europe, as the great Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis has pointed out. Some of them – such as the depiction in the Cathedral of Bologna of Mohammed in Dante’s Inferno – have been worse than the recent Danish ones.

So the test of the weakness of free societies in the face of militant Islam was set and militant Islam made us cower. Because it could. We fawned, we poodled, we said sorry. A lot. The same has happened in the Netherlands, where the brutal stabbing of Theo van Gogh has not led to a more robust defence of Dutch liberal values, but has instead resulted in Ayan Hirsi Ali, who has been dubbed a modern-day Spinoza for her commitment to putting Islam under the microscope, being hounded out. It is going on everywhere. The defiant are at risk. The Italian lawsuit against Oriana Fallaci, a journalist and author accused of defaming Islam in a book, is being brought by Adel Smith, head of the Italian Muslim Union, who is known for having sought to have crucifixes removed from classrooms in the public school in Abruzzo that his sons attend.

In Denmark the cartoon affair continues to have worrying effects. The very Islamists who set the affair in motion have good reason to regard subsequent developments as an outstanding triumph. Not even members of government dare speak freely for fear of being killed. In a superb, if deeply disturbing, article entitled ‘The Muhammed Affair and the Denmark Pact’, Danish authors Lars Hedegaard and Helle Meret Brix enumerate the ways in which the guilty clerics have managed to insinuate their way into the corridors of power. The same imams who stirred it up are acclaimed for having calmed things down. These clerics are advising the government while the cartoonists are under round-the-clock protection, their lives wrecked. One of the imams with close links to the Danish Security Intelligence Service, and publicly praised for his decency, was caught on camera by a French journalist saying of Naser Khader, a Social Liberal MP and an outspoken critic of Islamic fundamentalism, that all being well ‘two men will emerge and blow him and his ministry up.’

Such people are fast becoming the moral arbiters in Europe, while the rest of us prattle on agreeably about tolerance and respect.

To return to our own dear land, the same slippage is happening. Take the outgoing head of the infamously moderate Muslim Council of Britain, Iqbal Sacranie, who said that death would be too good for Salman Rushdie, and who called for the abolition of Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day. Or take his successor, Muhammad Abdul Bari. Bari runs a Saudi funded mosque, which did a press release in his name saying that the Muhammad cartoons were similar to the vilification of Jews by the Nazis, and he’s been linked to Tablighi Jamaat (home to American Taliban John Walker Lindh and our own London bomber Mohammed Siddique Khan) through the London Muslim Centre. Or take Tariq Ramadan, the man for whom the concept of Doublespeak – or taqiyya - could well have been coined. He has categorically condemned suicide bombing on British television while advocating it in other forums, as A Dankowitz, Director of MEMRI’s Reform Project, has pointed out. Ramadan is now a key government advisor and media spokesperson for ‘moderate’ Islam.

Quite obviously this is not about all Muslims, but the challenge posed by those that want a new caliphate, the challenge posed by those that want worldwide shari’a law, the challenge posed by those who want to see the overthrow of all western values, is real. Let’s not be found sleeping.

Two other pieces worth reading:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/011787.php
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001738.html