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Don't Apologize
Newspapers are supposed to traffic in the truth. That's why I'd like to see something like this in an editorial in an American newspaper: "We fully recognize that the Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad are nothing if not newsworthy at this point. But we aren't going to print them. We're scared to death. We remember what happened to Theo Van Gogh and we don't want this to happen to us. We must think about the lives of our staff."
Such an admission would be--like the recent electoral victory of Hamas--a clarifying moment.
European Muslims have tried to pretend a moral equivalence by creating a cartoon of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler--but in a column on the self-censorship of western newspapers, Michael Kinsley points out:
"[W]hatever point these European Muslims were making with their cartoon of Hitler and Anne Frank is more or less disproved by their very exercise. No one tried to stop them from putting the cartoon on the Web. The notion that jokes about Frank are beyond the pale is provably false. There's a play running in New York right now called '5 Questions for a Jewish Mother.' It's a monologue written and acted by stand-up comic Judy Gold, who says on stage every night that her mother used to read to her from a pop-up version of Anne Frank's diary, and would say, 'Pull the tab, Judith. Alive. Pull it again. Dead.' Maybe you had to be there. But the New York Times reviewer called the play 'fiercely funny, honest and moving' and did not demand that the author be executed or even admonished.
"By contrast, in a spectacular exercise of self-censorship, almost every major newspaper in this country is refraining from publishing the controversial Danish cartoons, even though they are at the center of a major news story that these papers cover at length every day. An editorial in the Times on Wednesday said that not publishing the cartoons was 'a reasonable choice' because they would offend many people and 'are so easy to describe in words.' As I write I am looking at a front-page photo in today's Times of Mariah Carey singing into a microphone. Words do it justice, I think."
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius is one of those liberals conservatives often praise--they sense in his convoluted reasoning a lack of hostility to conservative ideas. But in the end, he always comes out with the accepted liberal wisdom. In today's column, he compares the riots in the Muslim world to our own civil-rights movement and look for "hope beyond Muslim rage":
"Maybe the Muslim world will someday be able to laugh off slurs against the prophet Muhammad, but not now. The wounds are too raw; the sense of victimization is too immediate. I travel often to Muslim countries, and I am sometimes astonished at how hundreds of years of history can seem condensed into the present, so that every current injustice is magnified by the weight of every past one. I don't understand it, but then, I have to remind myself, I'm not a Muslim. I haven't lived it."
What wounds? What victimization? Not victimization by the West, for sure, though many of their own leaders have been tyrants. Ibn Warraq, bestselling writer and Muslim dissident, argues that if the West doesn't stand in solidarity with Denmark, then "the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest":
"Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.
"This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. Do we have to go on apologizing for the sins our fathers? Do we still have to apologize, for example, for the British Empire, when, in fact, the British presence in India led to the Indian Renaissance, resulted in famine relief, railways, roads and irrigation schemes, eradication of cholera, the civil service, the establishment of a universal educational system where none existed before, the institution of elected parliamentary democracy and the rule of law? What of the British architecture of Bombay and Calcutta? The British even gave back to the Indians their own past: it was European scholarship, archaeology and research that uncovered the greatness that was India; it was British government that did its best to save and conserve the monuments that were a witness to that past glory. British Imperialism preserved where earlier Islamic Imperialism destroyed thousands of Hindu temples."
Historian Victor Davis Hanson also urges that we "stand up for our values":
"We are seeing an escalating clash of civilizations—against a tense backdrop of the Iranian government's call for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, the election of Hamas terrorists in the Palestinian territories, and Western efforts to protect the new democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq from jihadist bombers.
"There is a great asymmetry in all this. Western notions of cultural tolerance and liberality are the benchmarks Muslims employ to condemn insensitive European journalism. Meanwhile, the Islamic Middle East is given a pass, as anti-Semitic state-run papers there daily portray Jews grotesquely."
Like Ibn Warraq, Victor Davis Hanson recognizes the danger of apologizing:
"Indeed, a number of sadly misguided Westerners—most prominently Bill Clinton—have condemned the published cartoons, missing the issue entirely and so sending exactly the wrong message: A private Western newspaper can crassly editorialize and lampoon as it likes. If it couldn't, or if it censored itself from doing so out of fear, then there would simply no longer be a West as we know it. That's why papers across Europe, from Spain to Poland, have republished the cartoons and faced the consequences."
Such an admission would be--like the recent electoral victory of Hamas--a clarifying moment.
European Muslims have tried to pretend a moral equivalence by creating a cartoon of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler--but in a column on the self-censorship of western newspapers, Michael Kinsley points out:
"[W]hatever point these European Muslims were making with their cartoon of Hitler and Anne Frank is more or less disproved by their very exercise. No one tried to stop them from putting the cartoon on the Web. The notion that jokes about Frank are beyond the pale is provably false. There's a play running in New York right now called '5 Questions for a Jewish Mother.' It's a monologue written and acted by stand-up comic Judy Gold, who says on stage every night that her mother used to read to her from a pop-up version of Anne Frank's diary, and would say, 'Pull the tab, Judith. Alive. Pull it again. Dead.' Maybe you had to be there. But the New York Times reviewer called the play 'fiercely funny, honest and moving' and did not demand that the author be executed or even admonished.
"By contrast, in a spectacular exercise of self-censorship, almost every major newspaper in this country is refraining from publishing the controversial Danish cartoons, even though they are at the center of a major news story that these papers cover at length every day. An editorial in the Times on Wednesday said that not publishing the cartoons was 'a reasonable choice' because they would offend many people and 'are so easy to describe in words.' As I write I am looking at a front-page photo in today's Times of Mariah Carey singing into a microphone. Words do it justice, I think."
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius is one of those liberals conservatives often praise--they sense in his convoluted reasoning a lack of hostility to conservative ideas. But in the end, he always comes out with the accepted liberal wisdom. In today's column, he compares the riots in the Muslim world to our own civil-rights movement and look for "hope beyond Muslim rage":
"Maybe the Muslim world will someday be able to laugh off slurs against the prophet Muhammad, but not now. The wounds are too raw; the sense of victimization is too immediate. I travel often to Muslim countries, and I am sometimes astonished at how hundreds of years of history can seem condensed into the present, so that every current injustice is magnified by the weight of every past one. I don't understand it, but then, I have to remind myself, I'm not a Muslim. I haven't lived it."
What wounds? What victimization? Not victimization by the West, for sure, though many of their own leaders have been tyrants. Ibn Warraq, bestselling writer and Muslim dissident, argues that if the West doesn't stand in solidarity with Denmark, then "the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest":
"Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.
"This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. Do we have to go on apologizing for the sins our fathers? Do we still have to apologize, for example, for the British Empire, when, in fact, the British presence in India led to the Indian Renaissance, resulted in famine relief, railways, roads and irrigation schemes, eradication of cholera, the civil service, the establishment of a universal educational system where none existed before, the institution of elected parliamentary democracy and the rule of law? What of the British architecture of Bombay and Calcutta? The British even gave back to the Indians their own past: it was European scholarship, archaeology and research that uncovered the greatness that was India; it was British government that did its best to save and conserve the monuments that were a witness to that past glory. British Imperialism preserved where earlier Islamic Imperialism destroyed thousands of Hindu temples."
Historian Victor Davis Hanson also urges that we "stand up for our values":
"We are seeing an escalating clash of civilizations—against a tense backdrop of the Iranian government's call for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, the election of Hamas terrorists in the Palestinian territories, and Western efforts to protect the new democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq from jihadist bombers.
"There is a great asymmetry in all this. Western notions of cultural tolerance and liberality are the benchmarks Muslims employ to condemn insensitive European journalism. Meanwhile, the Islamic Middle East is given a pass, as anti-Semitic state-run papers there daily portray Jews grotesquely."
Like Ibn Warraq, Victor Davis Hanson recognizes the danger of apologizing:
"Indeed, a number of sadly misguided Westerners—most prominently Bill Clinton—have condemned the published cartoons, missing the issue entirely and so sending exactly the wrong message: A private Western newspaper can crassly editorialize and lampoon as it likes. If it couldn't, or if it censored itself from doing so out of fear, then there would simply no longer be a West as we know it. That's why papers across Europe, from Spain to Poland, have republished the cartoons and faced the consequences."
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