“largely ignorant Muslim fundamentalists”

I am enjoying the headlines about “cartoon protests.” They definitely have a cartoonish quality about them.

Here’s an idea: the rest of the world should stop doing business with countries that are boycotting Danish and Norwegian companies.

I’m only being partially facetious. If you make it more expensive for the leaders to cut ties with Denmark and Norway, they won’t take such clearly pandering actions as declaring boycotts of Danish and Norwegian goods. Let the protesters eat whatever they can grow at home for a few months, then we’ll see how important a couple of cartoons are. I realize this would hurt the majority who are not protesting, and would have little impact on the corrupt ruling elites in the Middle East, which is why I am being partially facetious. But if you think the idea hasn’t occurred to leaders throughout the EU, you haven’t been paying attention.

Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali has an even better idea: stop apologizing:

Once again, the West pursued the principle of first turning one cheek, then the other. In fact, it’s already a tradition. In 1980, privately owned British broadcaster ITV aired a documentary about the stoning of a Saudi Arabian princess who had allegedly committed adultery. The government in Riyadh intervened and the British government issued an apology. We saw the same kowtowing response in 1987 when [Dutch comedian] Rudi Carrell derided [the Iranian leader] Ayatollah Khomeini in a comedy skit. In 2000, a play about the youngest wife of the prophet Mohammed, titled “Aisha,” was canceled before it ever opened in Rotterdam. Then there was the van Gogh murder and now the cartoons. We are constantly apologizing, and we don’t notice how much abuse we’re taking. Meanwhile, the other side doesn’t give an inch.
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Not a day passes, in Europe and elsewhere, when radical imams aren’t preaching hatred in their mosques. They call Jews and Christians inferior, and we say they’re just exercising their freedom of speech. When will the Europeans realize that the Islamists don’t allow their critics the same right? After the West prostrates itself, they’ll be more than happy to say that Allah has made the infidels spineless.

Hirsi Ali is the woman named in the note pinned to Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh’s dead body with a knife.

Thanks to John Scalzi for the delightful term “largely ignorant Muslim fundamentalists,” by the way, although he is far more concerned with the home-grown fundamentalism that leads to administrative censorship of science at NASA. In the end, we should all be more worried about that. The implications of losing to fundamentalist stupidity here at home are far more dire than some cartoonish protests half a world away.

I’m done blaming the European newspapers in this incident. Publishing those cartoons was wrong. They did it to prove a point. They knew it would cause an uproar, and it did. The papers have apologized, their governments have apologized, and the responsible parties have been disciplined and/or fired. Yet the protests continue, which says to me the protesters either don’t know how freedom of press works in Europe or they do know and think it shouldn’t exist (like the situation in their own countries). At this point, either position is indefensible. It is time to stop proving George W. Bush right.