Squeaky Wheels

Here are another two stories that caught my eye in the last few days.

Florida City Bans Christian Paintings

A central Florida artist has been told his childhood memories, depicted in paintings, are "too religious” to be displayed in his hometown.

Paintings by artist Lloyd Marcus have been banned from being exhibited during a Black History Month display in Deltona, Fla., an Orlando suburb, because some of the paintings contain "Christian symbols” that reflect the artist's memories of his childhood at his dad's storefront church. [Editor's Note: You can view Lloyd Marcus' "controversial" paintings by Clicking here now.]

Pro-Lifer Assaulted at William & Mary

At a memorial for abortion victims Tuesday night, a female student was allegedly assaulted while passing out pro-life information.

Just imagine if pro-lifers assaulted a pro-abortion activist on a college campus. Why, if Katie Couric weren't in Turin, she'd be in Williamsburg for tomorrow's show. This incident will likely be met with total national media silence.

Never mind that parallel; just imagine if Lloyd Marcus and this poor William & Mary student had been Muslim. The fruited plain would already be overrun with Islamic rage.

Oh, wait, that's right - that's why neither incident would have happened in that circumstance - right? What other explanation could there be? Mock and attack Christians and what's the worst that comes back at persecutors? Boycotts? Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell or Jim Dobson wagging their fingers in outraged rebuke? Certainly not riots, death threats, kidnappings, or bombings. But do the same thing to Muslims? We know what happens then.

C'mon, twelve Danish cartoons? Just look at the contempt hurled at Jesus Christ in the past few weeks:

Jesus of Nazareth is in desperate need of a new PR guy. Already in this young 2006, He has been depicted as a pot head, a hipster, a playboy, a French dynast and a figment of zealous imaginations all at the same time.

In a fresh example..., NBC was prepared to air an episode of Will & Grace in the spring in which Britney Spears was slated to guest star as the host of a Christian-themed cooking show crudely titled Cruci-fixins'. As with The Book of Daniel, NBC's earlier foray into Christ mockery, hundreds of thousands of Americans called and wrote letters in protest to the network. Network executives apparently decided it was in their financial self-interest to stop mocking Christians and, so they claim, have radically altered the script.

"Hundreds of thousands of Americans...called and wrote letters..." Notice any contrast with the "Inkifada"? Patrick Hynes does:

I happen to agree that the cartoons in question are in poor taste and needlessly provocative. But that Christians are mocked with greater malevolence from within their own culture than Muslims are even by outsiders is shamefully clear. And yet, these episodes speak volumes about the characteristics of Christianity that are obviously lacking in Islam: patience, mutual respect, and tolerance for dissent.

Traits obviously lacking in the securlarist Left as well. Don't be surprised if fatwas aren't issued against Hynes from both camps for that comment.

Indeed, it is one of the amazing ironies of this little ecumenical triangle that Western liberals and Muslims, radically different to outward appearances, have so much in common where it really counts: hatred of Western cultural traditions, rooted as they are in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and of the Jews and Christians that are its true heirs and contemporary defenders.

Cowardice is also a common thread between the two groups as well. Just as massacring civilians in lieu of honorable combat against an armed foe typifies today's Islamist "warriors," so libs express their hatreds and prejudices down the path of least resistance. Hynes elaborates:

For example, comparing conservative Christians to the Taliban, the failed tin pot dictatorship in Afghanistan that harbored Osama bin Laden before the U.S.-led coalition demolished it in 2001, became a cute trick of the political left after 9-11. Speaking at a rally in support of the Democrat candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in a 2004 special election, South Dakota Democrat Senator Tim Johnson exclaimed to a cheering crowd, "How sweet it's going to be on June 2nd when the Taliban wing of the Republican Party finds out what's happened in South Dakota." Senator Johnson later apologized for the hateful smear, but only after his remarks snowballed and began to threaten Democrat chances in the special election....

Penning an article under the charming headline "American Wahabbis and the Ten Commandments" for Mother Jones, William Thatcher Dowell wrote, "In a strange way, George Bush may now find himself in the same kind of trap that ensnared Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. To gain political support, Saud mobilized the fanatical, ultra-religious Wahabbi movement - the same movement which is spiritually at the core of the al Qaeda. Once the bargain was done, the Saudi Royal Family repeatedly found itself held politically hostage to an extremist, barely controllable movement populated by radical ideologues....President Bush has spent the last several months cajoling evangelicals and trying to pay off the political bill for their support."...

Fringe elements of the left do not act out on this fetish alone. Indeed, according to Howard Fineman of Newsweek the Democratic Party actually made a strategic decision to liken the Religious Right in America to oppressive, terror-sponsoring theocrats in the greater Middle East. Fineman wrote, "The theory goes like this. Our enemy in Afghanistan is religious extremism and intolerance. It's therefore more important than ever to honor the ideals of tolerance - religious, sexual, racial, reproductive - at home. The GOP is out of the mainstream, some Democrats will argue [this] year, because it's too dependent upon an intolerant religious right."

An "intolerant religious right" that is lampooned with impunity (even in a story about the Danish Mohammed cartoons) and whose boldest response is...phone calls and letters of protest. And...participation in the political process, where they have beaten the "tolerant" secular left - which refuses to tolerate them but will cut intolerant Islam a pass from here to eternity - fair and square. Might as well throw "hypocritical" into the adjective mix while we're at it.

Yet while the Cartoon Kerfuffle is proving very educational about the true nature of the various enemies of Christianity, it also appears to finally be getting the lessons about Islam through to a significant cross-section of Western opinionists (h/t TKS):

Fred Barnes:

It tells us a lot it tells us our enemy is not just al-Qaeda. That there's Muslims all over the world are certainly enemies of western civilization. Look at what the showing of these cartoons which I originally thought was a mistake. They shouldn't have run them. Now I think we've learned a lot from this. We see Muslims contempt for democracy, for freedom of speech, for freedom of the press and particularly for freedom of religion…

...from the size of these demonstrations, these are not jihadists, these are not people that are trying to get into Iraq so they can blow up a Shiite mosque or something or kill American soldiers, I think this is mainstream Islam in Britain and Denmark and all over Europe and then we see these — some of them are supposedly friendly Arab governments like Egypt and other places promoting this. This is not a fringe protest against Western civilization.

Michael Medved:

The whole idea that you have some right, that it is somehow appropriate to, and will actually cause glory for your religion for you to be attacking Embassies and killing people and burning flags and rioting over some cartoons that you will never see, except they were put in your world by provocateurs, cartoons from Northern Europe. That is a unique perspective with Islam, and shows that it has really become for many, many Muslims, unfortunately, a death cult, not a religion of life… I think there is a huge percentage of the Muslim population, probably bigger than 50%, that is susceptible to radicalization.

Blanton, a RedState contributor:

Rich Lowry ponders a post-Bush foreign policy and suspects we might soon see the emergence of a "to hell with them" hawk, who has no problem invading and destroying the enemy, but who does not want to stay behind and win the hearts and minds of the conquered.

I'd be lying if I denied thinking this sometimes. We are having great success in Iraq. And, should we wipe out the Iranian regime, I think we'd find the large Iranian middle class quite friendly to us.

But I think it is becoming more and more clear that the general rule of democracies not fighting one another just night not apply to the Middle East, though I suppose one could credibly argue that we have yet to see a genuine democracy in the Middle East other than Turkey, which does fit the rule.

The longer this cartoon controversy goes on, however, I'm more and more in the "nuke Mecca and be done with it" camp, and I regret getting closer to that position — but I find the hordes of angry Islamists willing to be swept up into a fury over cartoons to be appalling and, most likely, a harbinger of worse things to come.

I would rename that camp "We could nuke Mecca and it wouldn't provoke much worse of a reaction than those dumb Danish cartoons did," but otherwise the sentiment resonates.

Elsewhere RedState notes, “For some perspective, these are not isolated, small protests. They involve tens of thousands of Muslims around the globe. A single Palestinian protest was said to have involved over 10,000 demonstrators and several have involved more than 5,000. They spread from Indonesia, to the Middle East, to Europe.”

And then there is the estimable Charles Krauthammer:

What passes for moderation in the Islamic community - "I share your rage but don't torch that embassy'' - is nothing of the sort. It is simply a cynical way to endorse the goals of the mob without endorsing its means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is only interested in this instance of religious insensitivity.

Have any of these "moderates'' ever protested the grotesque caricatures of Christians and, most especially, Jews that are broadcast throughout the Middle East on a daily basis? The sermons on Palestinian TV that refer to Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys? The Syrian prime-time TV series that shows rabbis slaughtering a gentile boy in order to ritually consume his blood? The 41-part (!) series on Egyptian TV based on that anti-Semitic czarist forgery (and inspiration of the Nazis), The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, showing the Jews to be engaged in a century-old conspiracy to control the world?

A true Muslim moderate is one who protests desecrations of all faiths. Those who don't are not moderates but hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, using merely different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion, but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West.

And thanks to liberals in the West - both the U.S. and Europe - they are succeeding.

Jim Geraghty, whose residence in Turkey for the past year has caused him to miss the Muslim forest for the Ottoman trees, writes:

These are not the reactions of bigots or haters. These are the reactions of men and women whose patience is exhausted.

More accurately, these the reactions of men and women who can no longer deny the reality that this Cartoon Intifada has writ large, like the handwriting on the wall of Belshazzar's palace. Islam is not a "religion of peace," it is a religion of war and conquest, and while not every Muslim is a fundamentialist, most Muslims are at least sympathetic to the Koran's imperialistic goals.

And those imperialistic goals are shared by "the Prophet's" temporal and political descendents (h/t AmSpecBlog):

As leaders of the world's 57 Muslim nations gathered for a meeting in Mecca in December, issues like religious extremism dominated the official agenda. But much of the talk was of a wholly different issue: Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad.

The closing communiqué took note of the issue when it expressed "concern at rising hatred against Islam and Muslims and condemned the recent incident of desecration of the image of the Holy Prophet Muhammad in the media of certain countries" as well as over "using the freedom of expression as a pretext to defame religions."

The Inkifada, IOW, was a deliberately planned propaganda offensive augmented by mob violence and acts of war against several European nations (i.e. the destruction of their embassies in Beirut and Damascus) designed to coerce the West into the next level of pre-emptive dhimmitude (see also here and here). It's difficult to interpret recent events in this regard any other way, especially when what passes for Western condemnation of the riotious Islamic excesses elicits this kind of response:

The leader of Hezbollah, heading a march by hundreds of thousands of Shi'ite Muslims on Thursday, said U.S. President George W. Bush and his secretary of state should "shut up" after they accused Syria and Iran of fueling protests over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Sheik Hassan Nasrallah urged Muslims worldwide to continue demonstrations until there is an apology over the drawings and Europe passes laws forbidding insults to the prophet....

"There can be no settlement before an apology and there can be no settlement before laws are legislated by the European Parliament and the parliaments of European countries," Nasrallah said.

Islamic nations should demand "a law committing the press and the media in the West that proscribes insulting our prophet. If this matter cannot be achieved that means they (West) insist on continuing this," he added.

There is an old saying: "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." And some wheels, after getting the grease, raise their ambitions to taking over the entire vehicle. The Muslim world doesn't have the capability of accomplishing that - i.e. conquering Earth and imposing a global Caliphate - but it does have the power to destroy the planet by escalating the war to a level the effects of which no nation will be able to escape (i.e. Iran nuking Israel). And their erstwhile "moderate" citizenry will be mobilized behind them every step of the way.

In the mean time, how's this for a punchline:

Nasrallah said that if the controversy touched on Jews or Israel the West would have reacted differently and quickly.

"Is the Islamic world less important that a bunch of Zionists? We cannot acquiesce to this."

What an appreciation for comedic irony! Nasrallah is way funnier than those Danish cartoonists. He'd probably never consent to do Vegas, but perhaps an appearance on the Today Show wouldn't be out of the question - when Katie returns from Turin, of course.