ìToongateî

Several short and punchy “cut and paste” observations

‘A true Muslim moderate is one who protests desecrations of all faiths. Those who don't are not moderates but hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, merely using different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West. And these "moderates" are aided and abetted by Western "moderates" who publish pictures of the Virgin Mary covered with elephant dung and celebrate the "pee Christ" (a crucifix sitting in a jar of urine) as art deserving public subsidy, but who are seized with a sudden religious sensitivity when the subject is Muhammad….The mob is trying to dictate to Western newspapers, indeed Western governments, what is a legitimate subject for discussion and caricature. The cartoons do not begin to approach the artistic level of Salman Rushdie's prose, but that's not the point. The point is who decides what can be said and what can be drawn within the precincts of what we quaintly think of as the free world. The mob has turned this into a test case for freedom of speech in the West.'

Charles Krauthammer God save us from the voices of reason (Curse of the Moderates)

‘Immigrants, from whatever country or race or creed cannot descend on the industrialized west hoping to improve their economic conditions and at the same time demanding, in the case of Moslems, that the west abandon centuries of freedom for the statist faith their religious demands dictate. If they want financial benefits from our free economies, they must also respect the liberties of our free polities… When the President of Iran, the leaders of Al-Qaeda, Iraqi clerics like Moqtada al-Sadr, and the Saudi Wahhabis preach of the restoration of twelve-century Islamic hegemony over the world, they should be taken at their word. The back story to the current wave of "spontaneous demonstrations" shows just how far they are prepared to go in subverting truth and perverting justice. To this philosophy; to these men; to those who follow them; the west owes nothing.To those who think this issue arose suddenly and recently, think again. It is a case study of what Stalin called "...the big lie readily accepted by the broad mbuttes..." It is time that all the Islamist apologists in the west understood that the European Moslem protests are not so much home-grown as instigated, manipulated and directed by a Mid-East cabal of religious fanatics. Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, which first published the cartoons, insisted last week that his interest lay solely in butterting the right to free speech over religious taboos. " When Moslems say you are not showing respect, I would say: you are not asking for my respect, you are asking for my submission," he said.'

Beryl Wajsman Victory or submission: The Muslim Riots, Why we owe them nothing .

‘These angry Muslims demand that the world honor Islamic symbols and sensitivities, but adamantly refuse to grant the same to other religions. They don't just draw satirical cartoons or limit their insults to words and discriminatory laws. They have intentionally and regularly desecrated and destroyed religious icons, holy sites and houses of worship sacred to other faiths. Yet the world, including progressive democracies whose core ideal is tolerance, has remained silent about these buttaults on other religions…Where was the indignation when armed Palestinian Muslim persons forced their way into the Church of the Nativity in 2002 for 38 days and shot bullet holes in the walls and used the pages of Christian holy books as toilet paper?2 Why was there no outcry when Palestinian Muslims repeatedly attacked Jewish holy sites, such as Rachel's Tomb, or when they destroyed Joseph's Tomb, burned its prayer books, Bibles and religious articles and converted the age-old Jewish holy site into a mosque? How can Muslims demand that their sensibilities be respected when they buttault other religions and don't even begin soul-searching to rethink their own intolerance and religious prejudices? Something far more profound and ominous has been exposed by the cartoon incident. The radical Muslim message is clear: We can insult your religions. We can desecrate and destroy your holy places and kill your co-religionists, but you cannot do something as trivial as publishing satirical drawings of our sacred symbols. Only our religion should be honored and respected. The world must defer to our rules and sensitivities. If you violate them, we will erupt in riots and violence and call for your rests. In short, the incident has laid bare radical Islam's impbuttioned battle to dominate the West and impose Islamist values and a radical Islamist world order.'

Roberta Seid and Roz Rothstein Dangerous Hypocicy

‘We need to learn a new word: dhimmitude.

Dhimmitude is the coinage of a brilliant historian, Bat Ye'or, whose pioneering studies of the dhimmi, populations of Jews and Christians vanquished by Islamic jihad, have led her to conclude that a common culture has existed through the centuries among the varied dhimmi populations. From Egypt and Palestine to Iraq and Syria, from Morocco and Algeria to Spain, Sicily and Greece, from Armenia and the Balkans to the Caucasus: Wherever Islam conquered, surrendering dhimmi, known to Muslims as "people of the book the Bible," were tolerated, allowed to practice their religion, but at a dehumanizing cost. Freedom was lost, sorely circumscribed by a body of Islamic law (sharia) designed to subjugate, denigrate and humiliate the dhimmi. The resulting culture of self-abnegation, self-censorship and fear shared by far-flung dhimmi is the basis of dhimmitude. This is the lesson of Cartoon Rage 2006, a cultural nuke set off by an Islamic chain reaction to those 12 cartoons of Muhammad appearing in a Danish newspaper. We have watched the Muslim meltdown with shocked attention, but there is little recognition that its contagionous fallout is fear.With only a small roll of brave journals, mainly in Europe, to salute, we have seen the proud Western tradition of a free press bow its head and submit to an Islamic law against depictions of Muhammad. That's dhimmitude. Not that we admit it: We dress up our capitulation in fancy talk of "tolerance," "responsibility" and "sensitivity." '

Diana West, The Washington Times Cartoon Rage