Muslim barbarity reaction

In addition to the fine editorial cartoon at left, the boys at Cox and Forkum have a fine compendium of stories and reactions to the Muslim fanaticism explosion that followed the publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed and criticizing Islamic terrorism.

More reactions:

I like Ralph Peters in general, but his hatred of Europeans is far too deep, hence he comes up with a column more notable for a bit of moral equivalence than analysis.

James Pinkerton is more clear-eyed in his fine critique of multiculturalism that strikes at the main reason that the US has fewer problems with Muslim immigrants than the Europeans or Canadians:

Differences between the West and the Muslim world can be chalked up to just that - differences. That's the truth about world ethnicity, and no amount of politically correct wishful thinking will change that truth. Countries that ignore that basic lesson of history and political science put themselves at grave risk of internal discord, subversion and civil war. Either a country is united in its common culture or it becomes disunited in its multiculturalism.

For proof, we need only look to Europe, where millions of Muslims have been allowed to immigrate without much thought given to their political and cultural integration into their host societies. In London, Muslims responding to the Danish cartoons chanted pro-jihad slogans and carried signs reading "7/7 is on its way" - a reference to the terror bombings last July 7 that killed 52 innocent Britons. That's not free speech; that's incitement to violence. A nation allowing such hostile populations to flourish in its midst is not defending liberty. It is enabling its own national suicide.

Short of worldwide war, followed by occupation, there's not much the West can do about Muslim culture in Muslim lands. That's international multiculturalism, alas. But on the issue of intra-national multiculturalism, there's plenty we can do. We can monitor, we can insist upon political and cultural assimilation and we can impose strict controls on immigration and travel visas - down to zero if need be.

National Review (link in title of this post) has a cavalcade of opinion on the cartoons and the eruption of the "Muslim street."

UPDATE: I'm bumping this post up a day to add a couple of links and comments.

The Peters column I referenced above is an execrable exercise in both moral equivalence and blaming the victim. His logic is woefully poor. If the Danish paper acted irresponsibly merely by publishing the cartoons to make a stand against Islamic fundamentalism and for press freedom, while concurrently testing the boundaries of dialogue and objecting to an intimidation by Muslims to prevent Danish artists from illustrating a children's book about Islam (a multicultural activity designed to increase good feelings towards Islam in Denmark), then I'd expect Peters to say of Australian female victims of Muslim rape gangs that they acted irresponsibly by wearing her hair down or wearing shorts. The thought process alone is disgusting.

John O'Sullivan's column illuminates the mental poverty of Peters' piece by ridiculing calls for "restraint on both sides." Here's an excerpt:

. . . one side has published a handful of cartoons, arguably blasphemous and certainly insulting to the Prophet Mohammed, and the other side has burned embassies, taken hostages, murdered three people suspected of being Christians and/or Danes, shot at Danish soldiers helping children in Iraq, marched through London with banners threatening further bomb attacks on the city, and attacked and beaten people whom they suspected of some vague connection with, well, with Europe or Christianity.

Suppose both sides listen to these calls for restraint. What would happen? I suppose that one side would stop burning embassies and murdering people and the other side would no longer publish cartoons to which the murderers might object. That would mean the murderers had obtained their objective and the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons had been defeated in its campaign against the unofficial Islamist censorship that in recent years has spread across Europe by murder and intimidation.

Finally, the NY Press editorial staff made its own stand and walked out en masse when the paper's publishers refused to allow reprints of the Danish cartoons. Only three papers in the country, according to the NY Press' now-former editor, have published the cartoons. One is the NY Sun, one of the most honest newspapers in the country.