The Omega Letter Intelligence Digest
Vol: 53 Issue: 3 - Friday, February 03, 2006
The Satanic Pictures
The Europeans have, by and large, tried hard to play the role of dispassionate bystander in the war on terror. It isn't that the Europeans haven't felt the lash of terrorism; they have.
But since 9/11, the Europeans have behaved as if the war on terror had been foisted on them by the Americans. For decades, the Europeans have treated terrorism as a law enforcement, rather than a military problem.
The Europeans have maintained that characterizing the fight against terror as a 'war' only served to antagonize the populations that produce terror groups and made it harder to address terrorism's 'root causes'.
The Europeans are beginning to get an understanding of terror's 'root cause'. It's Islam.
Across Europe, Muslim mobs began smashing windows, burning cars, and burning flags in 'protest' of cartoons printed in the Danish press depicting the Prophet Mohammed. The cartoons -- and the backlash -- should have been another rude reminder that we are engaged in a war, rather than dealing with a criminal element.
Instead, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen summoned foreign envoys in Copenhagen to discuss the outcry and the government's response to the publication of the drawings before apologizing to the Islamic world on behalf of his country.
He promised he would do his "utmost to solve that problem" [the "problem," I hasten to point out, is freedom of the press] and noted that the Danish newspaper itself had already apologized for the drawings.
Egypt's ambassador to Denmark rejected the Danish apology out of hand, called it 'inadequate' and demanded that Denmark 'do more to appease the Arab world'. To underscore the demand, Palestinian gunmen seized and later released a German citizen, and a hand grenade was thrown into the compound of the French Cultural Center in the Gaza Strip.
The editor of a Norwegian magazine which reprinted the Danish cartoons said he had received 25 death threats and thousands of hate messages.
The European Commission even weighed in on the controversy, calling the cartoons 'imprudent'.
The London Sun reprinted the front pages of French daily France Soir and the Danish paper but obscured images of Mohammad with red boxes marked, 'censored'.
When CNN broadcast their report, they pixelated the offending portions of the cartoons so as not to repeat the offense.
Assessment:
Does anyone recall the last time an Islamic government apologized on behalf of the actions of their citizens? Fifteen of nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. Osama bin-Laden is a Saudi. Saudi Wahabbism is the dominant religious worldview of al-Qaeda.
Pakistan, whose parliament passed a resolution condemning Denmark, is also home to the A. Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network that gave Islam the means to make the Bomb.
The Palestinian Authority used to hide behind the fiction it had no control over the Islamic terrorist activity of its citizens -- before electing an Islamist terrorist government.
And caricatures of hook-nosed Jews planning to enslave the world are a mainstay of editorial cartoonists throughout the Arab world.
But even Kofi Annan weighed in on the Mohammed controversy, expressing 'concern' and chiding the West for not 'fully respecting Islamic religious beliefs and tenets.'
While it is being portrayed as a 'controversy' when national leaders begin apologizing on behalf of their citizens, 'controversy' gives way to 'appeasement'. And appeasement gives way to more appeasement.
It provides some measure of the true scope of the Islamic threat facing the western world -- and how truly serious western leaders regard that threat to be. (Imagine the Roosevelt administration apologizing to the Imperial Japanese for caricaturing the Emperor in an editorial cartoon in 1943.)
Currently, the western world is operating according to the mistaken belief articulated by President Bush in his State of the Union Address -- that the enemy is 'radical Islam' which the President described as "the perversion by a few of a noble faith into an ideology of terror and death."
The 'Satanic pictures'' appeasement strategy is built around that fiction. That is why it isn't working. Jihad is not the 'perversion of a noble faith' -- it is a fundamental precept of Islam.
Noted Qatari columnist Abdulaziz al-Mahmoud, "Muslims are fed up with insults of Islam and the Muslim world has reached breaking point."
In case there remains any lingering doubt as to the aims of the 'noble faith', the reaction of the 'mainstream' Islamic world should clear things up.
The choices are to appease Islam -- or else.
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