Kass Clash with Conservatives

John Kass in the Tribune is very exercised today about the supposed betrayal of their principles by conservative Republicans on the cartoon culture clash.

A fair reading of conservative opinion, though, would yield the conclusion that most conservatives are concerned about deeper cultural and security issues and about the manipulation of these cartoons by dictators in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia for their own ends. See Saturday's Wall St. Journal for a representative take:

As a way of addressing the Islamist threat to civil liberties in Europe, the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad were hardly ideal. The right to mock a religion may be absolute, but so is the right to publish most forms of pornography: Neither is appropriate in a serious publication. That applies whether the religion is Islam, Christianity or any other, and whether the cartoons are being published for the first time or reprinted elsewhere as acts of solidarity in the face of an implied threat.

But after the attacks on Western embassies in Beirut, Damascus and Tehran, the murder of a Catholic priest in Turkey, the death of at least a dozen people throughout the Middle East in anti-Danish rioting and protests in Europe in which Muslim demonstrators urged a "real Holocaust" on the West, questions about press freedom seem almost quaint. What we are dealing with here is something else entirely.

That something else might be called the premodernism of much of modern-day Islam, meaning the apparent unwillingness of too many Muslims to place reason above "honor" and deal proportionately with intellectual provocations. The Western philosophical tradition is founded on the belief that the execution of Socrates for blaspheming the gods of Athens was an injustice. When British Muslims carry placards reading "Butcher those who mock Islam," they are making their differences with that tradition depressingly plain.

The Journal goes on to talk about the conflict within Islam between moderates who embrace democracy and illiberal regimes and their clerics. See also my earlier post:Another Battle in Iran.

Conservatives do point out the hypocrisy of the US mainstream media in regularly mocking Christians and the hypocrisy of the Middle East media in regularly demonizing Jews. See my earlier posts; CNN:Craven News Network; Sense and Sensitivity; Freedom Go to Hell.

And unlike Democrat leaders, who publicly embraced Michael Moore and his fabrications, no conservative Republican leaders are calling for publication of these cartoons.

Cartoons are not the issue.

What demands our attention is a dictator calling for wiping out Israel with nukes. And backing and encouraging moderate Muslim leaders and emerging democracies in the Middle East.