Apparently, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition

The storm over the Danish Muhammed cartoons continues. (For an incredibly detailed, concise, and well-linked background on the incidents, followed by a totally shallow and worthless analysis of the root of the problem, see this SFgate.com article.)

Is this a two-sided issue? Should we be arguing about which is more important, the formal freedom of speech or the right of millions of (supposedly) downtrodden Muslims to keep their religious dignity?

No. This is a one-sided issue, and the Muslim mobs are on the wrong side. This Boston Globe column makes no bones about the baleful force rising on our planet:

Hindus may consider it odious to use cows as food but they do not resort to boycotts, threats and violence when non-Hindus eat hamburger or steak. They do not demand that everyone abide by the strictures of Hinduism and avoid words and deeds that Hindus might find upsetting. The same is true of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons: They don't lash out in violence when their religious sensibilities are offended. They certainly don't expect their beliefs to be immune from criticism, mockery or dissent.

But radical Muslims do.

The current uproar over cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper illustrates yet again the fascist intolerance that is at the heart of radical Islam.

Even more strident is this USA Today article, which states:

There is no equivalence between organized murder on behalf of a malignant social system and a half-dozen nerdy artists, speaking only for themselves, lampooning a fanatical religious sect whose members, by the way, specifically advance the delightful goal of exterminating millions of "infidels." The correct comparison, in fact, for Nazi and Klan terrorists are their brothers under the hoods — the jihadists who issued a death sentence on writer Salman Rushdie, who beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl and businessman Nick Berg, and who kidnapped an innocent American female journalist and showed videos of her sobbing and terrified among armed men holding guns to her head.
These are the fascist thugs, not the artists who draw cartoons in the service of democracy and truth. And those who out of a misguided sense of cultural sensitivity and niceness try to justify Muslim outrage over a cartoon are, frankly, lending aid and comfort to the enemies of civilization.

Strident, but it rings true.

Hard-line Muslim leaders like Imam Ahmed Abu-Laban, the man who first stirred up Muslim anger over the cartoons, sound divinely hypocritical when they try to make excuses like the following:

'The cartoons are merely the final drop that caused the cup to overflow. We have heard Western politicians relate our faith to terrorism, over and over again, and it is too much. This was the response.'

Sorry, but if you don't want your faith related to terrorism, burning embassies and threatening to behead people who insult your religion is not exactly helping your case.

Some apologists for the Islamic violence, such as this Beirut Daily Star editor, have tried to play the old anti-colonialist and anti-Israel cards:

It is perhaps time that we stopped being surprised by a phenomenon that has become routine: the affirmation of Islamic identity as the dominant form of national self-assertion in developing societies whose citizens suffer major grievances against the quality of their own statehood and governance as well as against Western and Israeli policies...Muslims, Arabs, Asians and others today are much more aware of the policies of Western states, concerned about their goals, angry about Western double standards, able to resist through the use of mass media, political, and other channels, and willing to stand up, fight back, and assert their right to live in freedom and dignity. The message from the Arab-Islamic heartland is that the 19th century has officially ended.

Nice try, but that dog just won't hunt anymore. It's hard to say that you're really just railing against colonialism or Israel when you're trying to intimidate and silence (or kill) the publishers of a newspaper in a nation that never colonized an Islamic country and is not a key supporter of Israel.

This is (mostly) not about Muslims trying to protect themselves from outside attack. It's about a worldwide ideology, spread by religious leaders with support from certain governments (Saudi Arabia), that wants to demonstrate its brute power over people whom that movement considers its greatest enemies (non-Muslim Europeans). This ideology flies in the face of our Western liberal ideology, which sanctifies the freedom of speech. And the radical Islamist ideology is not afraid to encourage violence, nor are many of its adherents afraid to carry it out.

I am not anti-Islamic, no more than I am anti-Christian for deploring the Spanish Inquisition. I am against the actions, the mindset, and the ideology of anyone who riots against the right to free speech, anyone who makes death threats to journalists, anyone who threatens to behead those who insult them, and anyone who agrees with any of those people. It is incumbent upon the practitioners of Islam to practice their religion in a way that does not threaten me with violence or restrict my freedoms, as these Afghanistani Muslim organizations have laudably urged.

For much of the last 500 years, Europeans committed innumerable atrocities in the name of Christianity - the aforementioned Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms, the devastation of Native American civilizations, the persecution and slaughter of European Protestants. We liberals still carry the scars of those brutal centuries in our collective consciousness, and so in any situation we naturally tend to look for a European Christian villain. It must be American foreign policy that's making these mobs riot, we think; it must be anger against (Christian-supported) Israel; it must be the legacy of European colonialism.

But it's not any of those things. The fact that Christianity and Europeans carried out violence in the past doesn't mean that the European descendants of Christians are automatically in the wrong. If we in the West allow our knee-jerk reaction of supporting the formerly colonized over the (neighbors of) former colonizers to override our willingness to stand up for our most fundamental freedom, then we've lost our way.

That Lebanese editor was right about one thing - it's not the 19th century any more.