Hell hath no fury like that of the people who used to run the world and want to run it again. I am speaking, of course, of Western Europe, a cesspool of racism and crude bigotry every bit as bad as the United States -- and in some respects even worse.
And stupid hypocrisy has no better exemplar than the Western liberal who would never lift a finger to fix the crying injustices in front of his face, but cloaks himself in the robes of a defiant saint when he sees a threat to his abstract idea of "free speech" -- by which he always means, more specifically, his right to be a self-important ninny, offering the world his beneficent instruction in the manner of Nicholas Kristof buying child prostitutes on the streets of Calcutta. This is the same type of person who actually believed that the British Empire was an attempt to wipe out the African slave trade and put an end to Indian bride-burning, even as the more practical-minded Cecil Rhodes walked off with all the blood money.
Now both the liberals and the more straightforward imperialists are in a flurry about protecting the "right" of a Danish newspaper to print war propaganda. I say war propaganda because the Danish government -- under the leadership of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a loathsome factotum of George Bush -- has been involved in the war in Iraq from the beginning. In September, a right-wing Danish newspaper supportive of his government published crude cartoons of Muhammad in a fairly standard attempt to mock and dehumanize the enemy in the course of a war, wholly in the tradition of First World War cartoons about "the Hun" or Julius Streicher's obscene caricatures of "the Jew Bolshevik." When Muslims became upset at this -- especially in light of the same Danish newspaper's longstanding campaign against immigrants -- newspapers throughout the racist cesspool of Europe decided to join in on the fun, on the ostensible grounds that no religion should be able to claim protection from "blasphemy" in a modern, secular society.
Anyone who has ever lived in an historically Muslim society will tell you that the secular have always had plenty of jokes to tell at the expense of the Prophet and at the expense of the pious (which in the real world amounts to the same thing), not least because ignorant, pious fools were always the main prop of corrupt US-supported governments against the secular left. But everyone in Muslim countries -- religious, secular, or in-between -- recognizes the arguments of the European newspapers as disingenuous. All of this is only incidentally about religion; it is really about the bigots of Europe -- including the liberal ones -- having a good laugh at the expense of the wogs. Europe imports millions of brown people from wrecked countries to do all of its least appealing work; houses them in wretched ghettoes; supports far-right politicians who bait and belittle them at every turn and more than occasionally incite violence against them; and treats immigrants like shit generally. Then it adds insult to injury by mocking their religion, and pretends to be saying condescending and pretentious nonsense to the effect that "Islam must reform and join the modern world," when it is clear that Europe is really saying "Muslims are subhumans best fit for low-paid labor who had better learn their station in life; furthermore, it's OK to kill them in our pointless wars."
The response of liberals to all of this has been predictably ridiculous. You know they hate brown people as much as Jean-Marie Le Pen, but their condemnations of "extremists" have that all-too-familiar, especially patronizing air about them. They find the anti-Danish riots in the Middle East "immature" (apparently the doodles of bigots don't qualify as such); they believe that Islamic countries must join the "modern" world; they think that the European newspapers are "courageous" in their defense of "free speech."
I've lost count of how many of them have compared this to the Rushdie affair, which is ludicrous; The Satanic Verses was a fine novel, not as good as his earlier Midnight's Children, but a genuine contribution to world culture nonetheless. It was also written by a lapsed Indian Muslim who obviously did not have immigrant-bashing as his motivation.
Others have pointed to satirical attacks on Christianity in the West, including Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, adding that in the West, institutions like the US National Endowment for the Arts actually subsidize alleged "blasphemy" against Christianity, while there is no space for secularist jibes at Islam in the Muslim world. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant, because the analogy is idiotic. There is no parallel between the Danish cartoons and Piss Christ; a more accurate analogy would be between the Danish cartoons and Sambo drawings.
All the while, as upstanding liberals express outrage and impatience with Muslim "intolerance," millions of immigrant workers in the heart of the West live in poverty and tens of millions of Muslims around the world live in even worse conditions thanks to policies that liberals ignore or endorse. Yet liberals think that it is the height of courage for newspapers to reprint dehumanizing, racist caricatures as an act of "free speech."
When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders. I hope all their embassies burn.
