The Belmont Club has had the best continuing commentary on the Danish cartoon crisis. On Friday, Wretchard posted a fascinating analysis that included an excerpt from Ralph Peters’ latest article:
We refuse to comprehend the suicide bomber’s soul — even though today’s wars are contests of souls, and belief is our enemy’s ultimate order of battle.
We write off the suicide bomber as a criminal, a wanton butcher, a terrorist. Yet, within his spiritual universe, he’s more heroic than the American soldier who throws himself atop a grenade to spare his comrades: He isn’t merely protecting other men, but defending his god. The suicide bomber can justify any level of carnage because he’s doing his god’s will. We agonize over a prisoner’s slapped face, while our enemies are lauded as heroes for killing innocent masses . . . .
A paradox of our time is that the overwhelmingly secular global media — a collection of natural-born religion-haters — have become the crucial accomplices of the suicide bomber fueled by rabid faith. Mass murderers are lionized as freedom fighters, while our own troops are attacked by the press they protect for the least waywardness or error.
One begins to wonder if the bomber’s suicidal impulse isn’t matched by a deep death wish affecting the West’s cultural froth. (What if
Darwin was right conceptually, but failed to grasp that homo sapiens’ most powerful evolutionary strategy is faith?) Both the suicide bomber and the "world intellectual" with his reflexive hatred of America exist in emotional realms that our rational models of analysis cannot explain. . . .
We are not (yet) at war with Islam, but the extreme believers within Islam are convinced that they are soldiers in a religious war against us. Despite their rhetoric, they are the crusaders. . . . Despite the horrors we have witnessed, we have yet to take religious terrorists seriously on their own self-evident terms.
Melanie Phillips writes in the same vein that the “still escalating confrontation over the Danish cartoons dramatically illustrates the now pathological reluctance of the leaders of
With holy war declared openly upon the West, with death threats being issued against cartoonists and editors, with Danes, Scandinavians and other Europeans being hunted for kidnap and in fear of their lives, with blood-curdling intimidation, with mob demonstrations, calls to behead westerners and rallying cries for ‘holy war’ by Islam against Europe, the governments of Britain and America are busy prostrating themselves before this terror, apologizing for “causing offence” and blaming the victims of this assault; while their intelligentsia earnestly debates whether it is wrong to insult someone else’s religion, for all the world as if this were a university ethics seminar rather than a world war being waged by clerical fascism against free societies and with people in hiding and in fear of their lives for having exercised the right to protest at religious violence and intimidation.
Wretchard writes that the retreat of the West in the face of this intimidation, with its concomitant refusal to defend its values and beliefs, will ultimately doom any hope that a moderate Islam will emerge:
This [clash of civilizations] does not mean that all-out hostilities between Islam and the West are unavoidable. But it does imply that cultural conflict and competition is inevitable and that these clashes must be played out on some sort of battlefield, though not necessarily a physical one.
The attitude of many Western intellectuals paralyzed by the cult of multiculturalism is ironically that "they don’t do culture". Mark Steyn understood that multiculturalism was fundamentally about evading cultural conflicts rather than resolving them. In the New Criterion he wrote: "the great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn’t involve knowing anything about other cultures — the capital of
Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It’s fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis". . . .
For who in Islam would believe in us if we did not believe in ourselves? Who in Islam could trust that we would fight at their side if we could not defend all that we were, all that we believed?
Victor Davis Hanson, in another essential article in today’s RealClearPoltics, writes that
[S]uddenly in 2006, the Europeans seem to have collectively resuscitated. The Madrid bombings, the murder of Theo van Gogh, the London subway attacks, and the French rioting in October and November seem to have prompted at least some Europeans at last to question their once hallowed sense of multiculturalism in which . . . Islamic terrorists abroad were seen as mere militants or extremists rather than enemies bent on destroying the West. . . .
The once plodding and ineffectual British-French-German diplomatic effort to circumvent
Iran’s nuclear program finally reached its predictable dead-end. But instead of the usual backtracking appeasement dressed up in diplomatic doublespeak about “multilateralism” and “dialogue”, the Europeans pointedly warned the Iranians that further enrichment was unacceptable and that the use of force to prevent acquisition of an Iranian bomb could not be ruled out. A Europe that once dismissed as retrograde America’s anti-ballistic missile system may well soon be in range of Iran’s envisioned nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. . . .
Recent polls show a majority of Europeans are becoming increasingly tired of . . . foreign aid programs that have given billions of dollars to the Palestine Authority that they now learn in the aftermath of Yasser Arafat’s death resulted in both rampant corruption and the Hamas backlash. It is one thing to subsidize a double-talking Arafat, quite another to keep giving money to terrorists who openly promise to finish the European holocaust. . . .
Two other developments better explain the warming in Atlantic relations and the Europeans’ sudden muscularity. First, the Bush administration wisely adopted a Zen-like strategy of keeping low and letting the ankle-biting Europeans take the lead in dealing with radical Islamists like the Iranian theocracy and Hamas. As we stayed silent and played the sullen bad cop, the good guys were sorely disappointed at learning that, yes, the Iranians want both the bomb and Israel destroyed, and that, yes, Hamas, is still intent on annihilating the Jewish state and expecting subsidies to realize that aim.
Second . . . Even the most diehard leftists are beginning to see that the fascists who once threatened Salman Rushdie and now bully the Danish cartoonists are the same as those who blow up female school teachers and reformers in Baghdad . . . .
It is not the capability but the will power of the Europeans that has been missing in this war so far. But while pundits argue over whether the European demographic crisis, lack of faith, stalled economy, or multiculturalism are at the root of the continent’s impotence, we should never forget that if aroused and pushed, a rearmed and powerful Europe could still be at the side of the United States in joint efforts against the jihadists.
And should we ever see a true alliance of such Western powers, the war against the fascists of the
Middle East would be simply over in short order.
UPDATE: VDH makes the point about a tipping point more explicit in his February 10 essay, in which he writes about the abject apologies to those who permit “gender apartheid, religious intolerance, political autocracy, homosexual persecution, honor killings, female circumcision, and a host of other unmentionables”:
“The deluded here might believe that the divide is a moral one, between a supposedly decadent secular West and a pious Middle East, rather than an existential one that is fueled by envy, jealousy, self-pity, and victimization. But to believe the cartoons represent the genuine anguish of an aggrieved puritanical society tainted by Western decadence, one would have to ignore that Turkey is the global nexus for the sex-slave market, that Afghanistan is the world’s opium farm, that the Saudi Royals have redefined casino junketeering, and that the repository of Hitlerian imagery is in the West Bank and Iran.
“The entire controversy over the cartoons is ludicrous, but often in history the trivial and ludicrous can wake a people up before the significant and tragic follow.”
One hopes. Faster, please.
ANOTHER UPDATE: The incomparable Yael on the relative rights of those involved in this “crisis” — essential reading.