Freedom Go to Hell

More Muslim moderate leaders are finally speaking up, after largely remaining silent after September 11th.

This is a welcome development. In Chicago, the spokesman here for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) had this to say:

Under the pretense of rising up to defend the honor of the Prophet, some Muslims have resorted to actions that would have shamed him.
Muhammad's greatest legacy is the values he came to preach. He put the importance of these values above his own person. It may even be said that his personal eminence was but a consequence of his being a messenger of these great values.

Today, many of these very same values are brought to disrepute, not by insignificant Danish cartoonists, but by Muslim societies. Yet no one takes to the streets in defense of those values that were dearer to the Prophet Muhammad than his own image.

Muslims would do well to consider angry and destructive mobs as a personal insult to the Prophet, who preached that "the best amongst you are those who can reign themselves in when angered... These cartoons have been exploited--if not devised--as agents to drive a wedge between a predominantly Christian Western society and Muslims in the West and around the world.

Mr. Rehab, though, draws a moral equivalence between those who published the cartoons and those who rioted against them.

You can't equate inflammatory words or pictures with violent actions. He goes on:

It is hard to note the shameless and bigoted stereotyping in the cartoons and not think back to the anti-Semitic depictions that engrossed Germany in the 1930s.

He has a point, but it would be better directed at virulently anti-semitic depictions common in the press in the Middle East.

David Brooks, in the NY Times today:

You want us to know how you feel. You in the Arab European League published a cartoon of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank so we in the West would understand how offended you were by those Danish cartoons. You at the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri are holding a Holocaust cartoon contest so we'll also know how you feel.

Well, I saw the Hitler-Anne Frank cartoon: the two have just had sex and Hitler says to her, "Write this one in your diary, Anne." But I still don't know how you feel. I still don't feel as if I should burn embassies or behead people or call on God or bin Laden to exterminate my foes. I still don't feel your rage. I don't feel threatened by a sophomoric cartoon, even one as tasteless as that one.

Brooks goes on:

At first I sympathized with your anger at the Danish cartoons because it's impolite to trample on other people's religious symbols. But as the rage spread and the issue grew more cosmic, many of us in the West were reminded of how vast the chasm is between you and us...In our world we spend our time sifting and measuring, throwing away the dumb and offensive, e-mailing the smart and the incisive...to live amid the conversation....

In my world, people search for truth in their own diverse ways. In your world, the faithful and the infidel battle for survival, and words and ideas and cartoons are nothing more than weapons in that war.

So, of course, what started in Denmark ended up for you with Hitler, the Holocaust and the Jew. But in your overreaction this past week, your defensiveness is showing. Democracy is coming to your region, and democracy brings the conversation. Mainstream leaders like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani are embracing democracy and denouncing your riots as "misguided and oppressive."