The fallout on the cartoons of Mohammed published first in a Danish newspaper in September and now in newspapers all over the world continues
It was one of those unpredictable Lebanese Sunday mornings. The ski slopes in the mountains overlooking Beirut would have been crowded with skiers enjoying the brilliant winter sunshine. Walkers were out along the Corniche, strolling in designer tracksuits. Downtown, the chic restaurants were preparing for lunchtime. And there were a few men on scooters riding around town broadcasting an imminent protest.
It wasn’t long before the heavily-laden coaches and minivans began to arrive from Beirut and the rest of Lebanon. They were all full of young, often bearded men who wore headbands and carried identical flags with calligraphic inscriptions in Arabic such as: “There is no god but God and Mohammad is his Prophet” and “O Nation of Muhammad, Wake Up.”
There were soon as many as 20,000 of them filling the streets. They walked up past the Christian quarter of Gemmayze and into the even more genteel Christian area of Achrafieh, gathering not far from the Danish embassy, the target of their protest. One man waved a placard in English that said: “Damn your beliefs and your liberty.” Another carried a sign saying: “Whoever insults Prophet Muhammad is to be killed.”
The police seemed to know the demonstrators were coming and had turned out in force with barriers, barbed wire fences and several large fire trucks. Just a day earlier, the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus had been torched by a furious mob, repeating the violent protests that have spread across the world from Gaza to Afghanistan to London. On Saturday night, anticipating trouble, the Danish diplomatic staff in Beirut flew home.
The mob stood in the street, chanting their fierce condemnation of the Danish cartoons that spawned this rapidly-spreading crisis. By 11am, the Lebanese police and army were firing tear gas at the crowd. The protesters threw volleys of stones. Some stuffed cotton wool into their nostrils to stifle the effect of the gas.
One group overturned a car and set it alight. Sunni clerics in robes tried to calm the young men down. They were ignored. One cleric, Ibrahim Ibrahim, said his pleas were met with stones and insults. “They are hooligans,” he said.
[emphasis mine]
As Jeff noted in the comments of a previous post here:
And let’s not forget that every Arab thugocracy has a stake in fomenting the cartoon wars, to point the finger of rage away from home. I’m sure some of these rent-a-mobs arrived on state subsidized buses.
The invasion of a foreign embassy or connivance at the invasion of a foreign embassy is an act of war. For five years my concern has been states that sponsor or condone terrorism (frequently for domestic political reasons). The world community (such as it is) stood by listlessly when our embassy was seized in Tehran more than 25 years ago and laid the foundation for the current mullahocracy in Iran and today’s radical Islamist terrorism worldwide. Will we see a similarly flaccid response this time around?
Let me be very clear: I think the original publication of the cartoons was thoughtless and counter-productive. But the editors of Jyllands-Posten certainly had a right to publish the cartoons. And regardless of their outrage those rioting and calling for murder have no right whatsoever to do so. Additionally, those in the Muslim world calling for suppression of Western newspapers and secondary boycotts display a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between the press and the government in the West. Unlike in many Middle Eastern Muslim countries newspapers in the West are not invariably organs of the state and the state’s legitimate power to control what’s published is quite limited.
Meanwhile with the rising level of violence more in the Left Blogosphere are beginning to take notice of the situation. I strongly recommend you read Suzanne Nossel’s post on the subject at Democracy Arsenal. I thought that she went off the rails a bit with this observation:
These days many European Muslims face the 21st century dilemma of whether to become a jihadi or a dentist. Their governments need to take urgent steps to tip those scales – improving education, extending economic opportunity, protecting civil rights, forging close alliances with pragmatic Muslim leaders – or find themselves hostage to terrorist attacks at home that will shred the very ideals they believe they are defending.
Unfortunately Denmark’s moving in the wrong direction, enforcing required Danish lessons and stricter marriage and citizenship laws. Europe needs to mount a full court press that’s part civil rights era-style reconciliation/integration between majority and minority groups, part War on Poverty-style efforts to combat Muslim unemployment, economic deprivation and social isolation, and part War on Terror-type efforts to identify and crack-down on violent radicals. And they need to do it soon.
I’ll repeat the gist of the comment I made to the post.
I wish that Suzanne would explore her thoughts on the problems with the Danish citizenship laws a little more thoroughly. The requirements (language, residence, allegiance) seem to me pretty commonsensical particularly in the context of an ethnic state like Denmark. Even today Denmark’s population is more ethnically homogeneous than was that of the United States in 1800 or the British Colonies in 1700 (when there were substantial African, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, and other components). It’s further unclear to me how fostering large communities within Denmark that aren’t ethnically, linguistically, or culturally Danish will foster the integration of immigrants into the society.
My previous posts on this subject are here:
Conflicting values
Generalizations, over-generalizations, and moderate Muslims
Voice of reason on the Danish cartoons
Appropriate publishing of images of Mohammed
A little learning is a dangerous thing
UPDATE: I see that the Norwegian prime minister is blaming the torching of his nation’s embassy in Syria on the Syrian government:
OSLO (Reuters) – Norway will complain to the United Nations about Syria’s failure to protect its embassy in Damascus from being torched by demonstrators angry over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said.
“We condemn what happened in Damascus strongly, it’s totally unacceptable and we are going to raise the question with the United Nations because this is a violation of international law,” Stoltenberg told Reuters in an interview.
“We hold the Syrian government responsible for the safety of Norwegian diplomatic personnel and we are going to ask for compensation for damage from Syria,” Stoltenberg said.
Thousands of demonstrators ransacked and set fire to the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus on Saturday, protesting the publication in those countries of cartoons depicting the Prophet.
The embassies were empty at the time and nobody was injured but both Norway and Denmark accuse Syria of not providing the extra security they had asked for as tensions flared over the images throughout the Muslim world.
It seems to me that the Syrian government has been skating on thin ice for years and I wonder how long its brinksmanship will be allowed to survive.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Ed Morrisey notes the lack of a broad base of support for the riots.
I am a dane and making drawings is something we have always done.
The drawings were made to make fun of those persons that see islam as something dangerous. Thats why they were made 🙂
Danish imams have publiced false drawings showing muhammad as pedofile. You have to deal with those imams – as the want to make a big conflict out of something that was not ment to be.
Best regards
Jan (danish and proude 😉
Right. The goal of integration and reconciliation is hardly fostered by encouraging immigrants and their offspring to live in culturally and linguistically isolated enclaves.
I have seen an old woman from Romania, who lives with her citizen daughter and son-in-law and helped raise her bilingual but completely American grandson, denied citizenship because she was unable, at her age, to sufficiently master the English language. That is cruel, and that is different from allowing whole generations of working-age immigrants to seal themselves off from the society they are petitioning to join.
As well you should be.
In my view the primary focus of our criticism should be on the Middle Eastern governments who support radical fundamentalist imams generally for cynical domestic political reasons. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the “Danish” imams you’re talking about are receiving funding from the Saudi government or other Midddle Eastern governments and are, consequently, agents of foreign governments.
As I implied in the post and have frequently written, I believe that the large numbers of immigrants from Middle Eastern countries will be a substantial challenge for the ethnic states of Europe.
Okay, Dave, we often disagree on the merits, but this time I think our divergence in what is to be done and what may be allowed can be seen in two of your conflicted statements…which may or may not represent a conflict within yourself or an uncertainty as how to proceed.
First you say that “The invasion of a foreign embassy or connivance at the invasion of a foreign embassy is an act of war.” You then remind us that how our craven government acted in Tehran 25 years ago set this kind of thing in motion. Agreed.
However, you then take the Danish newspaper to task for being “thoughtless” in publishing the cartoons. It was not thoughtless at all. The culture editor was approached by a Danish author who’d written a book on Mohammed and wanted someone to draw a few simple cartoon sketches for it. All the artists he asked were too scared. So he went to the J-P arts editor and talked to him. After some thought — and concern that Danish illustrators were so frightened — the paper decided to call for cartoons. When it did so, it said it was testing a bedrock Danish principle of freedom of speech, and was doing so out of concern for the growing Scandanavian silence in the face of Islamic thuggery. When it published the request for cartoons to be submitted, they said that it was a test of Denmark’s freedom of speech.
Denmark has been remarkable in her refusal to knuckle under. In April, when the Queen’s 65th b’day rolled around and her biography was published she had some harsh things to say about assimilation: that Danes had been lazy about acculurating foreigners into the country and that Muslims had been using the government system to their advantage and that had to stop.
In July, the Danish legislators passed tough new rules about immigration including child marriages (a lucrative business for Muslim Danes who could command hefty prices for their 13 y.o. girls and the spouse then became a citizen). There have been demands made to learn the language, to become educated, and to start being Danes.
In September the cartoons stirred things up, but not much. Then pressure started to build, led mainly by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It spread, as you know, but that spread was orchestrated and carefully choreographed. None of the violence was accidental.
When the PM told the Muslims he wasn’t going to “punish” the paper, that it wasn’t his job, he also suggested they take it to court. THey lost and are in appeals right now.
That much done, the Danish imam began his trek across the ME with the cartoons (which had already been published in the ME in September without comment). He did a real barnstorming trip. And a fiery one.
I’ve been posting on this since it started because I could see the train coming down the track. And here it is: on Sunday, 100,000 Muslims are gathering in London for a “Day of Anger.” They said they need to “channel” their rage. Right. They need to get a life and stop speaking like characters out of “A Clockwork Orange.”
What is wrong with the picture of 100,000 people gathering for a hate fest and the government letting it happen? These people aren’t even pretending not to be violent.
Our mistake in Tehran laid the foundation. Our continued silence is just more of the same. Meanwhile, the Islamicists continue their taqiyya with impunity. This is not about the cartoons. The cartoons were an excuse for the mayhem and pillage.
This is behavior by the book: the Koran.
Thanks, Dymphna. First, to clarify my position: it’s basically identical to Hugh Hewitt’s or Dafydd ab Hugh’s. Running the cartoons was rude and/or imprudent. Stirring the pot. And I honestly think that ethnic states like Denmark are in a pickle.
I wasn’t taking the Danish newspaper to task I was just characterizing it. The definition I was using for “thoughtless” was “inconsiderate or indifferent to the feelings of others”. I think that’s a fair characterization and I’ll stick to it. Of course, that’s their right but it doesn’t make it any less rude or counterproductive from our vantage point.
I agree completely with your exegesis of the events following the initial publication and I have to admit that I’m completely baffled by the behavior of the British government. Since when were death threats protected by freedom of speech?
I, too, look forward to the demonstrations on Sunday with foreboding.
I think you’re overgeneralizing a mite in your conclusion. Most of the demonstrations (and riots) so far have been by a tiny fraction of the people and lots of Muslims are just as appalled at them as you or I are at them. As one of the Iraqi bloggers put is “Whatever happened to writing a letter to the editor?”
I respect Muslims, rather the ones that are not planning to kill me. But I respect free speech also, and not letting free speech be controlled by terror. I believe the Danish people should be proud to freely speak their minds, and I hope they do not let the terrorists take that right from them. Nobody is above any other person, and that includes Muslims, so they need to accept the world will insult them just as freely as they will respect them. I made a game out of the Danish cartoon in response to this. Although the game starts with the introduction from their Prophet, it continues on into a shooting gallery for the ones who gave their Prophet a bad image, such as Osama Bin Laden. Enjoy the game, it is free for any to play, you can find it at my website, http://www.obber.com.