Content in the Key of "I"

UPDATE: the view from Iraq

Clash of civilizations or confined conflict? It's a long-running debate on this and other blogs. The 'Danish Cartoon' crisis settles the question for me, especially after the official Iranian response--cranking the anti-Jew volume to "11." Silly me: I thought anti-Semitic noise already was deafening.

Of course it's not just Jews; radical Islam is anti-Christianity (individuals as well as icons) too. Indeed, Arabs (some exceptions apply) actively invert the language of civilized culture:

Iran's supreme leader on Tuesday accused Western newspapers of an Israeli conspiracy for publishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Iranian air force personnel the drawings were particularly scandalous as they came "from those who champion civilization and free expression."

Worse still, the inversion infection's surfaced at the White House, and blanketed Foggy Bottom:

QUESTION: A couple of years ago, I think it was a couple of years ago when, I think it was the Syrians and the Lebanese were introducing this documentary about the Jews -- or it was the Egyptians -- this Administration spoke out very strongly about that and called it offensive, said it was --

[State Department spokesman SEAN] MCCORMACK: I just said that the images were offensive; we found them offensive.

QUESTION: Well, no you said that you understand that the Muslims found them offensive, but --

MR. MCCORMACK: I'm saying now, we find them offensive. And we certainly understand why Muslims would find these images offensive.

How did we get here? As usual, Victor Davis Hanson nails it:

Ever since that seminal death sentence handed down to Salman Rushdie by the Iranian theocracy, the Western world has incrementally and insidiously accepted these laws of asymmetry. Perhaps due to what might legitimately be called the lunacy principle ("these people are capable of doing anything at anytime"), the Muslim Middle East can insist on one standard of behavior for itself and quite another for others. It asks nothing of its own people and everything of everyone else's, while expecting no serious repercussions in the age of political correctness, in which affluent and leisured Westerners are frantic to avoid any disruption in their rather sheltered lives.

Then there is "President" Ahmadinejad of Iran, who, a mere 60 years after the Holocaust, trumps Mein Kampf by not only promising, like Hitler, to wipe out the Jews, but, unlike the ascendant Fuhrer, going about the business of quite publicly obtaining the means to do it. And the rest of the Islamic world, nursed on the daily "apes and pigs" slurs, can just scarcely conceal its envy that the Persian Shiite outsider will bell the cat before they do.

The architects of September 11, by general consent, hide somewhere on the Pakistani border. A recent American missile strike that killed a few of them was roundly condemned by the Pakistani government. Although a recipient of billions of dollars in American aid and debt relief, and admittedly harboring those responsible for 9/11, it castigates the U.S. for violating borders in pursuit of our deadly enemies who, while on Pakistani soil, boast of planning yet another mass murder of Americans. . .

The list of hypocrisies could be expanded. The locus classicus, of course, is bin Laden's fanciful fatwas. Oil pumped for $5 a barrel and sold for $70 is called stealing resources. Tens of millions of Muslims emigrating to the United States and Europe, while very few Westerners reside in the Middle East, is deemed "occupying our lands." Israel, the biblical home of the Jews, and subsequently claimed for centuries by Persians, Greeks, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Franks, Ottomans, and English is "occupied by crusader infidels" — as if the entire world is to accept that world history began only in the seventh century A.D.

The only mystery is not how bizarre the news will be from the Middle East, but why the autocratic Middle Easterners feel so confident that any would pay their lunacy such attention.

The answer? Oil and nukes — and sometimes the two in combination.

The UN Security Council can prove pointless or revive and realize its aims, including enforcing nuclear non-proliferation obligations Iran itself accepted. As for oil, even the President's proposals are nuts: "central planners in the Department of Energy decide which technologies hold the greatest promise, and spend taxpayers' money to find out if they can do a better job than markets in allocating resources to technologies that just might yield alternatives to oil." Price signals and sweat out-perform GS 15-steered subsidies any day. See, e.g., Japan since 1990.

But even cheap energy stalls when censored. See, e.g., Saudi Arabia since 1975. Listen to Ibn Warraq -- pen-name of a Pakistani-born Islamic apostate -- in Der Spiegel:

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth.

Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.

Speech is unruly and intemperate. Ugliness is all too common. And authors can -- and sometimes should -- reconsider or regret ill-considered language and illogic.

Still, a free press necessarily implies individual, not collective, responsibility for content. So considering the cartoons, forget first person plural--no nation, no society "dissed" anyone. And ignore the return-serve slandar from the Arab world: the real issue is the outlawing of thought and faith -- penalties range from harassment to expulsion to death -- wherever Islam rules.

I'm neither regretful nor responsible. But I'd rather fight than switch.


More:

Omar at Iraq the Model:

We have all seen common people protesting in the streets of different countries and we heard many condemnations from governments but as far as I know, not a single Muslim government took any action, except for one…Iraq's! . . .

Our brilliant transportation minister Salam al-Maliki who is a Sadrist by the way announced that his ministry will suspend all projects and contracts with Denmark and Norway and said that Iraq will stop accepting any donations or offers concerning Iraq's reconstruction!

Who are they harming by doing this? Denmark? No…they are harming no one but Iraq and Iraqis. . .

One last thing, even if the entire EU apologizes it won't change a thing; fanatics in our countries here had always considered the west their infidel arrogant crusader enemy and no apology no matter how big or sincere can change that.

(via Sigmund, Carl & Alfred)