Cartoon Jihad Rethink

Has the Cartoon Jihad resulted in unintended consequences for those who instigated it?

A recent Islamic conference held in Britain (co-sponsored with the British government and paid for by the Saudis at Wilton Park) revealed a new attitude among some Muslims. Stephen Schwartz in The Weekly Standard (new 5/29 issue, subscribe for full article):

Conversations with a number of those attending left the impression that the cartoon controversy had produced an effect nobody expected: It had made ordinary Muslims in Western Europe realize how fast their situation could take a sharp turn for the worse. One Muslim born in Africa and living in a major Western European city, speaking not for attribution, told me, "After 9/11, Westerners were shocked; after 7/7, they were angry; but after the cartoon affair they are simply contemptuous of us. They think we are stupid, easily manipulated, and offended by trivial matters. And increasingly, we feel they do not want us around."

Perhaps aided by blunt truths from our British allies, even a previously harsh Muslim critic of the West who lives in Denmark moderated his tone:

And the Blair government's stand alongside the United States was forthrightly expressed in an opening speech by U.K. minister of state in the Foreign Office Kim Howells, a tough former miners' union official from Wales. Howells said that military "action in Afghanistan and Iraq had nothing to do with the faith of Islam but with the political and security issues that these countries posed." He went on to ridicule those who claim the Iraq intervention was motivated by oil.

Howells's candor seems to have had an effect. At the end of the Wilton Park event, Bashy Quraishy, an Indian Muslim minority-rights monitor who lives in Denmark and distinguished himself at the 2005 Warsaw conference by his virulent attacks on Western media and on George W. Bush, proposed that European Muslim groups open a serious dialogue with Jewish groups, putting aside past disagreements in the interest of a common continental civility.

And non-Muslim Danish observers were treated with respect, a welcome development. There is more good information in the article.

And for Danish-American solidarity, view Chicago Hitchens-inspired Rally Pix here and here.