Immoveable Object Meets Irresistible Force

     I have been watching with some amusement as the media try to decide how to react to the current brouhaha over the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting Muhammad in an unflattering light. At least it would be amusing if it weren’t so serious. There are few things so precious to western media types as a free press and Muslims absolutely cannot abide any criticism of their religion or its prophet. It’s no surprise that they have collided head on. Actually it is a bit odd that either side can see the issue in terms of anything but black and white. But here we have a few Muslims condemning the violence and political correctness trumps even a free press in some western circles. The only religious groups they are allowed to criticize are Christian. The Dallas Morning News has taken the plague-on-both your-houses approach, printing one of the offending cartoons with the image of Muhammad dubbed out.
     Now let me say I think the cartoons are in bad taste, but they are political cartoons, not religious ones. Bad taste is stock-in-trade for a political satirist. It can be most effective when it captures an unflattering stereotype and uses it to make a political point, in this case that journalists risk their lives when they take on Islamic extremists. The stereotype is not one created by the media. Muslims did that for them and now are reinforcing it in spades. In the process they are also demonstrating that intolerance is not confined to the fringes. It is a fair characterization of the community at large. They are reminding us all just how much difficulty we still face in trying to integrate Muslims into the modern world.
     Then there is the fantastic double standard that is apparently held almost universally by Muslims. The vilest slander applied to Christians and Jews is nothing more that good clean fun but even a hint of disrespect toward Islam is intolerable. Muslims can’t expect much sympathy for offended sensibilities when they have that sort of attitude. The depiction of Christians and Jews I have been seeing in the Muslim media are as bad as anything from Nazi propagandists. In the twenty first century these people are still accusing Judaism of sponsoring ritual murder of Muslim children in order to use their blood in the Seder meal. Muslim clerics and political leaders regularly accuse Jews of plotting to take over the world, citing as proof The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, 85 years after that document was debunked as a libelous Tsarist fraud. Does anybody seriously think these people can be placated by any amount of western “sensitivity?”
     Having said all that, I still think the cartoons were in bad taste but the sad truth is the cartoonist pretty much got it right. The modern face of Islam is one of violence, hatred, and extreme intolerance. It is of young men slaughtering the innocent, dictators practicing thuggery, clerics spewing venom, and ordinary Muslims wallowing in the filth of religious bigotry. It doesn’t have to be that way but no amount of political correctness is going to change it. That is going to require the community to take a hard look at itself and its attitudes. Until it does I don’t see how Muslims will ever take their place in the world. The process may take generations to work its way through. In the mean time a free press is here to stay. They are going to have to learn to deal with it. There is no avoiding it.