From the AP:
A Pakistani cleric announced Friday a $1 million bounty for killing a cartoonist who drew Prophet Muhammad, as thousands joined street protests and Denmark temporarily closed its embassy and advised its citizens to leave the country.
Police confined the former leader of an Islamic militant group to his home to prevent him from addressing supporters over the cartoons, amid fears he could incite violence, after riots this week killed five people.
Security forces were out in strength, particularly around government offices and Western businesses, as Muslims streamed onto the streets after Friday prayers. More than 200 people were detained, but most gatherings were peaceful.
In neighboring India, police used batons and tear gas to disperse thousands of angry worshippers who rioted in the southern city of Hyderabad. They burned Danish flags, pelted police with stones, and looted shops. Hundreds more protested in Bangladesh.
In the northwestern Pakistan city of Peshawar, prayer leader Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi announced the bounty for killing a cartoonist to about 1,000 people outside the Mohabat Khan mosque.
Qureshi said the mosque and his religious school would give $25,000 and a car, while a local jewelers’ association would give another $1 million. No representative of the association was available to confirm it had made the offer.
“This is a unanimous decision by all imams (prayer leaders) of Islam that whoever insults the prophet deserves to be killed and whoever will take this insulting man to his end, will get this prize,” Qureshi said.
Qureshi did not name any cartoonist in his announcement. He did not appear aware that 12 different people had drawn the pictures.
A Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, first printed the prophet pictures by 12 cartoonists in September.
Sure, it would have been helpful had Qureshi and the rest of the Muslim men of God had provided the incited and teeming Muslim street with an actual name to go along with the “prize”—we wouldn’t want otherwise peaceful populace to go around burning or stabbing or beheading the wrong westerner just because he or she happens to “look white,” after all—but hey, publishing the cartoons was an affront to Islam—and the west, let’s face it, is here to make concessions and offer outward signs of conciliation to whomever Islamists are able to artificially incite.
So if a few hundred whites who had nothing to do with cartoons are killed, or their businesses burned, or their families harrassed, such is the price of tolerance. Because remember: you can’t make a tolerance omelet without beheading a few infidel chickens.
Speaking of which, the UK Telegraph notes that the EU—not to be out toleranced by any charred or beheaded Dane cartoonists—are looking to take preemptive tolerant actions to join in a bond of love with the theocrats who put the face on wordwide Islamism. From “Weed out textbooks offensive to Muslims”:
School textbooks should be reviewed for intolerant depictions of Islam and other faiths by experts overseen by the European Union and Islamic leaders, the European Parliament was told yesterday.
The call for a special committee to examine religious education in schools came from Hans-Gert Pöttering, the German Christian Democrat, who heads the largest group of MEPs. But the proposal was immediately condemned as “appeasement” by Charles Tannock, a British Conservative MEP.
Mr Pöttering, the head of the centre-Right, but largely federalist European People’s Party, said the work of building bridges between Islam and the West had to “begin with young people”.
During a debate intended to show Europe’s unity in the face of the row over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, he said textbooks should be checked to ensure they promoted European values without propagating religious stereotypes or prejudice.
He also called for similar tolerance in the Islamic world, holding up examples of anti-Semitic cartoons taken from the Middle East and suggesting a parallel review should be made of Islamic school books.
He also suggested that the EU could co-operate with the 56-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which has its headquarters in Saudi Arabia, to create a textbook review committee.
“They could help to choose the experts to sit on this committee,” he said.
But Dr Tannock, the Conservatives’ foreign affairs spokesman at the European Parliament, said: “This sounds like an exercise in political correctness and appeasement. I don’t see why we should be bringing children into this debate.”
A pox on those that call this “appeasement”. Appeasement is an offensive word, and we can’t have that.
No, today we prefer “tolerance” to the loaded “appeasement”—and this is the kind precisely the kind of tolerance one can have easily predicted would grow from a PC culture driven by warring identity groups—particularly when the carefully-manipulated public face one of those groups has shown a penchant for burning shit and rioting wildly when they don’t get their way. It is a tolerance that relies on the removal of all offense, rather than the acceptance of offense and the absense of retaliation in the name of all forms of freedom of expression.
It is, in a word, illiberal. Or, if you prefer, Orwellian.
To make certain concessions to outraged Muslims bearing the retinal scars of cartoons, then—to protect their feelings and take some of the sting out of their victimization (they were, after all, “offended,” were they not—and that we simply cannot have)—it is simply natural to look to one’s own western culture to see what it did to cause such “lashing out”.
Which the EU, bless their tolerant enlightened hearts, seem willing to do—even over the objections of some old British curmudgeon who wouldn’t know tolerance if it came up and jammed a note in his chest on the end of hunting knife. And what they are guilty of, they’ve discovered, is getting a little too free with the speech. Save that stuff for those who don’t put fatwas and bounties out on peoples’ head indiscriminately. Tis not cowardice, after all, but pragmatism that demands such!
So yes, by all means I think it appropriate that European Union textbooks be vetted “for potential offense” to Muslims by Saudis (official sponsers of the Wahhabist strain of Islam); after all, what good is answering to the “tolerance” implicit in the demands of multiculturalism as a organizing social principle if you aren’t willing to let the individual identity groups dictate their own narratives?
Truth? Feh. Overrated. What is important is pride and the kind of tolerance that sands away the rough edges of unpleasantry from official group narratives, then stains over any defects in the wood, in order to build a beautiful altar to self-determination by force of group will.
(via STACLU and Allah)
****
update: What about here at home, you ask? Well, this is certainly interesting if true (and mind the sources, please).
Honestly, even I have a hard time believing the US Press would massage a story in such a way that it has the short term effect of extinguishing what is a potentially enormous story—and the long term effect of determining how we fight the war on terror—particularly when the tapes will soon be released publicly, and alternate translations will be available.
Still, though. Something to keep an eye on.
I’m a little unclear on what you’re trying to say here, Jeff.
How, exactly, does the EU appeasing the terrorists absolve you of your armadillo duties?
The european union welcomes its new overlords.
However, this is not nearly as bad as the widespread rioting by CHristians after the piss christ art was revealed. If I remember correctly, Christians burned at least 2 major cities to the ground as well as slaughtered thousands of unbelievers.
But of course, to the left, Christianity (and apparently Judaism) is a far greater threat than Islam.
Do not give up on the Euros just yet. They do have a tendency to get us into their world wars, though, don’t they? Where in the heck is Charles Martel when you need him?
I still say we should put the Mo-HAM-id cartoons up on billboards here in America, see who shows up with their beheading equipment and let the SWAT sharpshooters pick ‘em off.
too subtle?
Drawing them out?
Man, that’s poetry.
I wonder at what point “Europe” will officially vanish?
You no what we will be calling white europeans in 20 yrs? Americans
What’s all the fuss? $1 Million per cartoonist, and there’s like 12 of them….., that’s like $10 million to tag and bag the entire bunch! I hate to be insensitive, but that’s a lot of cheese we’re talking about.
Fuck morals and identity politics! I’ll whack some Danes for those duckets.
$10 Mil would keep me stocked up in Woodford Reserve and hand-jobs for at least a couple of years.
I would desperately love to see someone put together a proper op-ed suggesting that in order to reach out, we would also like to see islamic countries vet the textbooks they use, and that the west would get to help appoint people for those committees.
“You no what we will be calling white europeans in 20 yrs? Americans”
Lou,
True as it may be, we can expect another great exodus of white non-muslim Euros due to the conversion of all Europe to Islam. Might seem far fetched? Yes maybe, but essentially that is the major goal in my opinion, and the chain of events surely point to that. Time to build a bunker……
RACIALIST!!!
TV (Harry)
Have you ever noticed how often the Muslim claims an assualt on his visual senses? First it was requiring women to go around in sacks, then it was the offensive statues of a ‘false G-d’ and now it is cartoons.
Do you think they would be offended if I suggested that the simplest solution would be to take their eyes? It makes about as much sense as the solutions they come up with, and has the extra added benefit of a prevention of further abuse being heaped on the poor man’s eyes.
I think we should start an ‘eyes for allah’ fund.
This Mark Steyn piece is over a month old, but I just found it. The lede is a little different – not so much “death of the West via soft shari’a” but “death of the West via low birthrate” but it makes a similar point: until and unless Europe actually starts defending that which makes it “the West” by demanding that non-Euro immigrants assimilate in the European direction instead of Europeans assimilating in the other direction, Europe as a culture is going to be gone by 2050 or so. (Sooner, I’d say, if they decide to throw over their values in the name of tolerance as quickly as they seem to be attempting.)
I’m still pulling for Europe. Nothing that was ever so great should fall so far, so fast.
I just blogged on the subject at – ahem -intolerable length. The scenario Steyn sees is A Handmaid’s Tale, but with fundamentalist Muslims rather than fundamentalist Christians in control.
TW: french. Is this thing kidding?
think we should start an ‘eyes for allah’ fund.
No bad idea.
That would just encourage more Muslim skull fng
So some guy orders a hit, with a $25,000 dollar pay off, in front of 1000 witnesses, and he’s not arrested why?
*So some guy orders a hit, with a $25,000 dollar pay off, in front of 1000 witnesses, and he’s not arrested why? *
Because Islam is a backwards fucking religion.
On the other hand, I wonder how much we’d have to put up to have this guy whacked? I mean, turnabout is fair play, no?
You know what’s gonna pass muster?
“My Pet Jew”.
TW: how, as in “you may ask yourself, well, how did [we] get here?”
Hmmmmm.
What’s really spectacularly heartening is that the fellow who announced this reward has been paid by American Muslims to come over here and speak at mosques.
Hey B Moe, think it really matters to him?
“Tolerance” means tolerating things that offend you. Removing things that offend you is not tolerance, it’s nihilism. How is this complicated?
And BTW, perhaps some enterprising sociopath will track down the Danish imam who made the fake cartoons (like the “pig-man” one), lop his head off, and demand the $1 mil.
I always analyze policy backward from its effects, because it’s chumpy to trust stated motives and whitewash over the rest with “unintended consequences.” States act in their own interestâ€â€period. They’re not incompetent; they’re liars. So the EU appeasements have me a little confused.
Do EU leaders want shari’aâ€â€not really much of a change from the dominant philosophies of European government since Enclosure (with the Enlightenment read as a fluke, a crushed rebellion)â€â€so they’re importing it via the well-paved “sensitivity” sideroad because that’s cheaper (and less resistible) than rolling tanks around the Eiffel Tower (again)? First glance, I say yes.
Or Do they know Steyn’s numbers, see a future of powerlessness, and so they’re forming a fascist bloc with “Islam” (as much of South and Central America are) to wedge between the US and China? There’s evidence, but not much.
Or Is it really an accident? Did they weaken themselves with soft philosophies, unaware that there’s a force waiting to fill the vacuum they left by rejecting Locke/Voltaire/etcâ€â€or, hell, even Lenin and Hitler? “Yeah. They’re pussies.” They are, but they’re not. They really can’t have gone from continent-sized killing machine to global pushover in a few decades, can they? If they have, it wasn’t intentional. Or not quite.
…
I don’t get it. But whatever it is, it sucks.
Similarly, you can’t bring democracy to the Middle East without NUKING IRAN INTO A GLOWING SLICK OF MOLTEN GLASS AND *MghflGblG!!!*
Sorry.
I’m better now.
I start going through all my kids textbooks just to see what kind of insensitivities to Islam there might be within. Everything’s cool ‘till I get to the Algebra text. Algebra, from the arabic Al-gbrae, which literally translates into English as “Fuck if I know?”. I don’t know whether that’s offensive or not but I’m not taking any chances. I burnt that sucker in the fireplace. The flames were constant but the smoke varied. Or maybe it was the inverse. I was kinda shook up.
“When the People lose their sense of awe,
They turn to Religion.
When they no longer trust themselves,
They depend upon Authority.
Once dependent, madness rules.”
The fanatics should have never started a mocking war, the west is skilled in that martial art.
“Blasphemous Mohammed emoticons, via Rand Simberg”
(via Instapundit via Transterrestrial Musings)
so here is
Muhammad on a bad turban day
))):~{>
I await the Muhammad-style smiley-faces
myself. 
If you aren’t willing to have your own kid’s head lobbed off for drawing a mohammad cartoon, you have no right to complain against the fatwa.
Jeff- have you considered entering the Iranian newspapers Holocaust cartoon contest? I would love to see them flooded with cartoons, especially from jewish entrants. Just to get them to stfu.
I prefer action figures.
No way, MayBee. An Australian cartoonist named Leunig already won the Iranian contest, check out Tim Blair for delicious updates.
Excellent piece, Jeff, as usual. Many comments have been very good, too.
http://virb.com/iigajcnt buy zithromax on line