An Assault on Western Values

Fire of Liberty

John O'Sullivan has a great column over at the Chicago Sun-Times on how the whole Muslim outrage over the cartoons that were published in Denmark have definitely been a one-sided attack against the West and its liberal values (classical liberal and not Jimmy Carter's version.). Take a gander at what O'Sullivan had to write:

For, contrary to much "responsible" commentary, Jyllands-Posten, the small regional Danish newspaper that first published the caricatures of Mohammed, did not do so from trivial motives. This was not the kind of avant garde "shock" tactics on show in "Piss Christ" or in the "Sensations" exhibition in Brooklyn that included a painting of the Virgin Mary splattered with elephant dung. It was a serious and justified protest against the fact that Danish artists had been frightened out of illustrating a children's book on Islam and Mohammed.

They feared for their lives -- and their fear was reasonable. In Holland last year the film-maker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a radical Islamist for his semi-pornographic film criticizing Islam as hostile to women. His collaborator, a Somali-Dutch feminist MP, is now under permanent police protection.

Nor were the Danish cartoons all as crude and pointless as some critics have alleged. One cartoon shows the Prophet with his turban evolving into a bomb. Insulting? Maybe. Blasphemous? Perhaps. Or maybe a perfectly fair comment on the arguments of radical Islamists that their religion justifies the murder of innocent bystanders, on the subsidies that Muslim governments give to suicide bombers, and on the thousands of Muslims baying for blood in response to a caricature.

Three cartoons were more harsh and insulting than the rest. But these had not been published originally in Jyllands-Posten. They were added by the radical Islamists who distributed the cartoons around the Muslim world. Vile though it is, this trickery by radical Islamists at least demonstrates the uselessness of appeasing their demands for censorship. If they are granted, our concessions will merely be the springboard for a further attack on Western liberty. And if we disobligingly refuse to furnish them with a pretext, the Islamists will manufacture one. We might as well fight in the first ditch rather than the last.

Check out the rest and you won't be disappointed. I just hope more folks take his words to heart because its sound advice.