Those Danish Cartoons of Muhammed

You have to click on each one to see the whole cartoon and a translation, but go here to see what has caused the Muslim world to explode.

When the US government funded an artist who showed the Crucifix in a jar of urine, one of our methods of peaceful protest was to elect a Republican Congress; but let ‘Newsweek’ file a phony report on flushing a Koran, or let some cartoons refer to Islam’s prophet, Muhammed, in ways that link him to violence, and the Muslim world goes violently crazy. It is really ludicrous because the acts of these fanatics (killing people, burning down Danish embassies in Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere and driving the cartoonists into hiding in fear of their lives) make the point of the cartoons. They are reacting violently to suggestions that they are violent. If it were not so serious, and if people were not getting killed and maimed, it would almost be funny. I think the cartoons are blasphemous and in poor taste and should not have been published, but the Danish newspaper had every right to publish them.

My regular readers know that I have stressed over and over that we have to see the difference between the great majority of Muslims who only want to live in peace and those few radicals who want to enforce a return to Muslim dominance by killing and terrorizing anyone who stands in their way. But my patience is being tried by these peaceful Muslims who stand silently by (or cheer from a distance) while all forms of terrorism are carried out in the name of their religion. It has already become very clear that the organization in the United States called CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) is not only overly protective of the sensibilities of Muslim-Americans, but is an active participant in the funding and enabling of terrorist acts. Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.

Only in Jordan have we really seen an uprising by Muslims against the Islamofascist thugs and murderers – and that only possibly because the recent attack by al-Zarqawi was aimed at a popular Muslim government. Instead we see so-called peaceful Muslims justifying the London bombings and the French car-torchings, with the connivance of liberal news media referring to these thugs and assassins as “youths”, “insurgents” and “freedom-fighters”. Apparently also, the Saudis, while fighting terrorists at home, continue to fund groups here in the US and abroad who have close ties to terrorists. We see the faint beginnings of a rising up of some Muslims against the terrorists in Iraq, but when are we going to see a wholesale rising up across the globe? Only then can there be a major breakthrough and a wholesale reduction in the violence.

We may have reached a tipping point that can go either way. A response by majority Muslims that condemns this violence and takes punitive measures against the perpetrators would tip one way; silence or tacit support will tip the war on terror into a war against Islam. If we can not co-exist, we will come out shooting.


In all fairness I do have to point out this comment made on an Islamic web site in Iraq, Iraq The Model: "You know that those cartoons were published for the 1st time months ago and we here in the Middle East have tons of jokes about Allah, the prophets and the angels that are way more offensive, funny and obscene than those poorly-made cartoons, yet no one ever got shot for telling one of those jokes or at least we had never seen rallies and protests against those infidel joke-tellers.

What I want to say is that I think the reactions were planned to be exaggerated this time by some Middle Eastern regimes and are not mere public reaction.

And I think Syria and Iran have the motives to trigger such reactions in order to get away from the pressures applied by the international community on those regimes.

However, I cannot claim that Muslim community is innocent for there have been outrageous reactions outside the range of Syria's or Iran's influence but again, these protests and threats are more political than religious in nature.

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."