Flemming Rose, culture editor of the Jyllands-Posten, has a long op-ed in the Washington Post, explaining his rationale for publishing the Mohammed Cartoons. In it he highlights something which so far has been somewhat underreported:

Since the Sept. 30 publication of the cartoons, we have had a constructive debate in Denmark and Europe about freedom of expression, freedom of religion and respect for immigrants and people's beliefs. Never before have so many Danish Muslims participated in a public dialogue -- in town hall meetings, letters to editors, opinion columns and debates on radio and TV. We have had no anti-Muslim riots, no Muslims fleeing the country and no Muslims committing violence. The radical imams who misinformed their counterparts in the Middle East about the situation for Muslims in Denmark have been marginalized. They no longer speak for the Muslim community in Denmark because moderate Muslims have had the courage to speak out against them.

In January, Jyllands-Posten ran three full pages of interviews and photos of moderate Muslims saying no to being represented by the imams. They insist that their faith is compatible with a modern secular democracy.

Modernization is crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who are bombarded with negative images of the West, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Pentagon chief said today's weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.

[ ... ]

He lamented that vast media attention about U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq outweighed that given to the discovery of "Saddam Hussein's mass graves."

The other part of the Rumsfeld lament is not so much content-driven messaging, but the actual jihad that takes place in cyberspace. There the enemy has had a distinct advantage for some time, most notably because a lot of the counter-terror measures taken by the west never took account of their futility in the presence of the enemy’s technological savvy. Deporting a radical imam because you want him to stop influencing disoriented Muslim youths in Europe is not terribly effective if they are getting their orientation online.

UPDATE: Here's the full text of Rumsfeld's speech, via Dan Drezner.

Michelle Malkin has another cartoon round-up in place and in it she links to this post at Riehl World which has a threatening video, targeting the journalists of the Norwegian publication Magazinet which was the first outlet to republish the cartoons outside Denmark. As it happens, Bruce Bawer has a longer piece about Magazinet's editor up on his site, summarizing how the editor of the magazine, Velbjorn Selbekk, initially stood up for his rights to re-publish the cartoons. However, as Bruce reports, the end of the story is not very encouraging at all:

There, to the astonishment of his supporters, Selbekk issued an abject apology for reprinting the cartoons. At his side, accepting his act of contrition on behalf of 46 Muslim organizations and asking that all threats now be withdrawn, was Mohammed Hamdan, head of Norway’s Islamic Council. In attendance were members of the Norwegian cabinet and the largest assemblage of imams in Norway's history. It was a picture right out of a sharia courtroom: the dhimmi prostrating himself before the Muslim leader, and the leader pardoning him – and, for good measure, declaring Selbekk to be henceforth under his protection, as if it were he, Hamdan, and not the Norwegian police, that held in his hands the security of citizens in Norway.

This case demonstrates once more that in the pursuit of press freedom individuals in the west have as much to fear from their own governments as they have from jihadist zealots. In fact, it's even scarier to find out that in turning to the institution you trust for your protection, you are forced to discover that it has aligned itself with your enemy. What strikes me as a particular odd turn of events here is that had Norway been a part of the EU - which has slowly and tentatively confirmed its support for press freedom - it would have had far less leverage to come down on Selbekk in the way it has. Poor man, poor Norway.

I've been meaning to link to CompassPoint's interview with Bruce Bawer, but I never got around to actually doing it. Today Glenn today reminds of the interview again as well as Bawer's new book. Read the whole interview, Bawer nails the subject matter superbly.

The Jakarta Post used to be a pretty unreadable newspaper - at least in the 1990s when I worked in Indonesia - but the waves of democratic change have contributed to a publication that has improved significantly. And it seems it is impervious to the darker forces that seek to foment unrest in the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Today's online edition has a very concise debunking of how radicals in the Muslim world have fomented the cartoon crisis and why Indonesia can and should act differently:

In conclusion, it would be wise for all of us here in Indonesia, with the world's largest Muslim population, to reflect on these questions, and not let ourselves get riled by provocateurs, whose stock-in-trade are false rumors meant to cause conflict in which everybody loses.

Let us also keep in mind the context of how this all came about: It was in Denmark, in a particular socio-political climate relating to a specific discourse within that whole context. The caricatures were seen as a healthy, satirical exercise in freedom and tolerance amongst Danes -- Muslims and non-Muslims.

Earlier this week it seemed that we were not getting a very uniform and coherent statement from the European Union with regards to supporting its member-state Denmark. The European Parliament yesterday however appeared to be lining up behind the embattled Danes:

Freedom of expression and independence of the press are "universal rights" but ones which must be "exercised with responsibility", "within the limits of the law" and with "respect for religious feelings and beliefs". That was the message Parliament delivered in a joint resolution. In the wake of the furore which has surrounded the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in some European newspapers.

[ ... ]

MEPs also expressed their "full support and solidarity" with Denmark and recalled Article 11 of the Treaty of European Union, which establishes that Member States shall support the Union's external and security policy "actively and unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity". Boycott against one Member State is in contradiction with trade agreements concluded with the EU as a whole, MEPs stressed.

[ ... ]

Parliament also "regrets the renewed and increased anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli propaganda in some Arab countries and Iran. The House points out that in these countries degrading and humiliating cartoons of Jews are regularly printed, thus showing they obviously do not apply the same standards to all religious communities".

While all commendable and somewhat of a relief, it is telling that it took the EU around ten days to come up with what appears to be a unified message. And while on the face of it that may be seen as a negative, it may actually be evidence that the European leadership has taken a wait-and-see attitude to determine where both the general and in particular member state sentiment is headed before it takes a formal position. For those that are anxious about the potential for a central, top-down Euro-state, good news. And in this case, where the difference between right and wrong is so patently clear, an encouraging development. But, it prompts one to think about the many issues where Europeans are less vocal and where the EU can determine its direction without any real outside interference. Not because it is not hearing it, but because it is not getting it.

The only real dissonant was the EU’s foreign policy chief’s Middle East tour, where the focus appeared to have been on appeasing the Arab and Muslim world, rather than communicating the importance of the views of freethinking Europeans.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has said that the Danish cartoon row should not be allowed to cause a rift between Europeans and Muslims, while visiting the Middle East in a bid to soothe tension over the drawings.

Theme blogging over at Pajamas Media: the WMD Files and Gold Rush.

The best thing to read today is Glenn Reynolds' piece on blogging, Blogging: for Love or Money?

And no, that's not a philosophical question.

PhysicsWeb has the answer.

There was precious little appetite on my part to weigh into the Dick Cheney commotion, so I won't. But do check out Virginia Postrel, entirely my sentiments.

UPDATE: As usual, Peggy Noonan gets it:

Why would they be thinking about this? It's not the shooting incident itself, it's that Dick Cheney has been the administration's hate magnet for five years now. Halliburton, energy meetings, Libby, Plamegate. This was not all bad for the White House: Mr. Cheney took the heat that would otherwise have been turned solely on George Bush. So he had utility, and he's experienced and talented and organized, and Mr. Bush admires and respects him. But, at a certain point a hate magnet can draw so much hate you don't want to hold it in your hand anymore, you want to drop it, and pick up something else. Is this fair? Nah. But fair has nothing to do with it.

Lively lunch-time discussion today over the nature of sport, and whether any activity which is judged on purely subjective qualities can possibly be called a sport. This topic of course was a natural evolution of a discussion on Olympic figure skating. More specifically, the scoring.

If you've watched even a few minutes of the olympics this year then you know that figure skating has completely overhauled the way the sport is scored because of The Scandal.

Forget the old, complicated system open to fraud, which allowed "perfect" scores even if a skater fell.

Todays skating scores are...more random. A statistician with perhaps too much time on his hands has determined that the new method of randomly selecting 9 of 12 judges, and then tossing out the high and low scores, means that the selection process might toss out 3 higher scores, or 3 lower scores etc.

Scoring aside, I'm sticking to my original position, which is that any activity, no matter how athlectic or difficult, in which your costume factors into whether or not you win cannot truly be a sport.

Yes, that goes for synchronized swimming as well.

Andrew Stuttaford yesterday pointed to how the European community of nations is leaving their Danish partner out in the cold. As his piece went online, Dutch Foreign Minister Bot was visiting Saudi Arabia to try and defuse the situation, by meeting with his Saudi counterpart, and after that and somewhat unexpected, King Abdullah himself. Here's a translated update from The Telegraaf, and it confirms Stuttaford’s grim expectations (highlights mine):

Bot went to Saudi Arabia “with a firm and principal” message. “We are not negotiating our freedom of expression and freedom of the press” said Bot. But at the same time he expressed his understanding that feelings in the Muslim world were hurt by the cartoons. “We don’t really understand how Islam functions” admitted Bot on Tuesday.

Bot expressed his understanding for the hurt feelings, but it remains unclear how the conflict between Europe and the Islamic world is going to get resolved. That, according to the minister, depends on a possible statement from the Danish government, which is what Muslims want.

An unambiguous European position about the cartoon crisis does not exist.

We all know where this is heading. The Danes will become increasingly isolated and be forced by the circumstances to issue a fuzzy statement that pleases no one, but it will be enough to defuse the crisis and allow the Muslim world to claim some sort of victory. And King Abdullah, as keeper of the faith will have scored a few points that he probably badly needs in his struggle with extremists at home. And Europe's press freedom? It will have suffered irreparable damage.

UPDATE: Germany is expected to apologize too.

Vladimir Putin's overtures to Hamas have raised quite a few eyebrows and he may have set a precedent which he may come to reget down the road, as Richard Cohen notes:

But in the real world, Putin ought to bear in mind the example he is setting. If he can talk with Hamas, why can't others talk to the Chechens? He himself takes umbrage whenever anyone meets with Chechen political leaders -- not, mind you, terrorists -- because he makes no distinction between the two. But when it comes to Hamas, Putin is willing to embrace it all -- political wing, terrorist wing: It makes no difference to him. At least until he shows differently, the only distinction he makes is between the killers of innocent Russians and the killers of innocent Israelis.

The idea that Putin is fomenting unrest in the Middle East by setting Jyllands-Posten up to publish the cartoons is far-fetched in my book, but it does shed some light on the Russians cozying up to Hamas. It's a move that is driven by a lot of things, but making peace or contributing to a road-map is surely not one of them.

Former Hong Kong Governor and EU-Commissioner Chris Patten is back with a new book called Cousins and Strangers and it is getting mixed reviews. The book is a mixture of assessing the situation in the world today and where Patten believes the various key players, in particular Europe and America, should be moving:

In Cousins and Strangers, Chris Patten, one of Europe’s most distinguished statesmen, scrutinizes the final years of the twentieth century and how the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 fundamentally changed the nature of this Western alliance. Today, the threat of terrorism, economic competition from Asia, and a seemingly unbridgeable cultural divide have strained the alliance to a moment of reckoning. Patten argues that America’s status as the only superpower must be reined in, but he also warns Europe against too ardently challenging U.S. leadership. He questions whether Britain needs to choose between bolstering its “special relationship” with the United States and forging a greater role in a united Europe.

It is here that Patten provides some incisive views and he is at his best in my opinion when he discusses China, and to some extent India. Rather than branding the resurgent Middle Kingdom as the next global military threat – something which the Pentagon’s Quarterly Defense Review attempted to do last week – Patten sees the nation as a partner of the West in bringing peace and prosperity to the world. As discussed here before, I believe that is the only rational position to take, but that doesn’t mean that we should always kowtow to Beijing in order to have meeting of minds. On the contrary, and Patten himself can rightfully claim to be one of the few Western leaders to have stood up against the Chinese leadership, which he argues has always been quite respectful to him despite their past altercations. They have “much more sophistication than those who wish to curry favor with them”, and that is probably a sound piece of advice for anyone engaging the Chinese leadership.

Patten’s wish for Britain to play a bigger role in a more integrated Europe and for the US to revert to some sort of pre-9/11 magnanimous multilateral player may not be based in today’s political reality. Even a post-Bush era will be subject to the shifts that occurred during his tenure in the White House, something Patten conveniently discounts. His assessment of the origins of jihadist terror, well we can equally open them up to debate. But, if we want to map our way into the future and define our relationship with newly emerging economic superpowers such as China and India, then Patten’s superb ability to articulate the threats and opportunities is extremely useful. In that, he probably stands alone among his European contemporaries. But then, he is no longer bound by an electorate and can freely speak his mind.

Does anyone remember the jihadist pizza delivery boy who intended to bomb Amsterdam's red light district, protesting its lack of morals? Well, he is going to stay in prison for a bit longer following a sentencing today for recruitment activities in prison. The irony of the case? He is serving two sentences now, none of which were handed out for his most serious offense: planning to attack the red light district. Yes, that famous Amsterdam attraction is also an important part of the west's freedoms.

Irshad Manji's column for the The Wall Street Journal is now available online at her own website. Key excerpt:

For one thing, the Koran itself points out that there will always be non-believers, and that it's for Allah, not Muslims, to deal with them. More than that, the Koran says there is "no compulsion in religion." Which suggests that nobody should be forced to treat Islamic norms as sacred.

Iran said on Tuesday that the fatwa or religious edict condemning British author Salman Rushdie to death over his novel The Satanic Verses will remain in force forever.

The announcement was made on the anniversary of the 1989 edict issued by the leader of Iran's Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and comes amid global Muslim outrage over cartoons denigrating the prophet Muhammad.

There was a time when Al Gore did everything in his power to insult his hosts, something considerably different from his appeasement performance this week in Jiddah. Both speeches, eight years apart, however share one common theme: Al's total lack of self-restraint.

NOTE: At the time I actually was quite supportive of Gore's remarks in support of Malaysia's sacked and jailed former Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim. However, anyone could have predicted - and should have advised the then Vice President of the United States - that lecturing your Malaysian host in public would at best, be counter-productive.

Anne Applebaum has commented on Theodore Dalrymple’s piece on Europe’s doomed future by listing three aspects – political leadership, embracing the new Europe and stop being obsessed with the US – that she believes are currently holding Europe back. As Anne says, the list is of course much longer and without much difficulty we can throw in political apathy, demographics and unintegrated Muslims, but the overarching theme to me seems to be a deep rooted fear of change which in turn finds its origins in being a pampered and somewhat self-indulgent polity. So to take Applebaum’s points, there is not a lot of political capital going around to take on drastic reforms, immigration from the former Soviet world has sparked serious unease with unskilled yet highly motivated workers competing with Europe’s lethargic workforce, and finally: the opposite of blasting the US would be embracing it, which again, implies some drastic change.

There is a lot of Euro-doomsday commentary making the rounds at the moment and I for one was one of the earlier ones to take on and promote that topic, but we need to apply some caution. Over-simplification yields terrible analysis.

Firstly, there is not one monolith called Europe and any probe needs to make very clear the distinction between the various parts and groups that constitute today’s Europe. Secondly, and that is something that Jay Reding correctly notices, there is no place for American complacency. Americans do have some challenges with their current set of leaders, are not exactly clever or pro-active in embracing its immigration issues and are fairly unengaged when it comes to casting a ballot. But there’s one thing that Americans got right from day one and they still know how to deal with it far better than their ancestors: change.

James Na has launched a new blog with news and analysis about a divided peninsula: The Korea Liberator.

Today the cartoon crisis moved into Canada following the Western Standard's decision to publish the cartoons. Here's their editor, Ezra Levant:

The Western Standard has no explaining to do. We're a news magazine, and these cartoons are news. The publishers, editors and TV producers who are behaving as if they live under sharia law, not the Charter of Rights, have explaining to do -- to their readers and viewers.

The consensus among those that support publishing the cartoons is that it is the left-liberal approach of appeasement and tolerance that is ultimately betraying what that very left-liberal tradition fought for during the 1960s and 1970s. Here's a fascinating essay in the Observer by Andrew Anthony:

And the press in Britain has chosen not to publish it or any of the 11 other cartoons that first appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten back in September.

The overwhelming consensus of liberal Britain is that this was the right decision. Almost everywhere one looks there is a sense - half-anxious, half-smug - of satisfaction at the delicacy of our media. This sentiment is often accompanied by a series of further received wisdoms: the Danish nation, and in particular Jyllands-Posten, was right-wing, stupid, and racist; the European papers that republished the cartoons are xenophobic provocateurs; British Muslims are rightly distressed, even though the cartoons were not published in this country; and the police acted with commendable sense in not preventing the Islamic militants who called for murder from marching in the streets of London.

In fact it is their job to prevent you from fully understanding this story. As of this writing no major newspaper in Britain has published the cartoons; the BBC has shown them only fleetingly and other networks have shied away. All have decided not to give you this critical information, without which no intelligent person can construct an informed and intelligent position on the matter. You’re on your own.

The reasons given are conventional enough: the press doesn’t want to inflame matters further; the cartoons are indeed offensive, and no editor has to publish images that would appal readers; reprinting would merely play into the hands of extremists, and so on.

The one argument you haven’t heard is the one you hear off-camera. Many editors simply don’t want to put their staffs at risk of physical danger.

There are three things worth checking out today and the first one is Glenn Reynolds' appearance on CNN where he strongly denounces the network's attitude towards the cartoon crisis.

Then of course there is Mark Steyn who again points out - like he did last week on Hugh Hewitt's show - that radical Islam is essentially a European export product. That theme is further elaborated by Fouad Ajami, who is the director of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University and who has the following observation:

You would have expected European Islam to be more tolerant, but it was the other way around. The troubles migrated from England and made their way through the Islamic world, and we saw what happened.

In the case of these cartoons, this is exactly what happened. The Muslim activists in Denmark took their cause to the Islamic world. As they worked their way through the Islamic world, there was this exquisite little irony: They went into regimes that oppress Islamists, which kill Islamists, but which were more than willing to lend a helping hand, because such is what you have to do.

There is a great role played in this crisis by the Egyptian ambassador to Denmark. He became deeply engaged in this question. I find it ironic that the Egyptian regime, completely secular and completely merciless in its treatment of its own Islamists, suddenly offers tremendous support and finds that it has a lot of time and a lot of patience with the Danish activists and their concerns.

Here an interesting piece by Christopher Shea that challenges the well-known theory that Europe is about to collapse. Its underlying notion is that welfare states can be made to work and that the Euro-choice to take less income and have more leisure time (as opposed to Americans) doesn't necessarily spell the continent's demise. I agree with this take as it is built on the assumption that there is not ‘one Europe’ but rather different groupings of European nations that each move at very different speeds. And thus economic and social outcomes are equally different, per group, and per nation. And it is possible, much as I disagree with some of them, to make certain choices about welfare and taxation so that even at a reduced level of prosperity societies can continue to thrive for a certain period of time.

The danger however is that - and it goes for North America too – none of the economic choices are taken within isolation. Globalization will put pressure on the sustainability of the European leisure model and over time adjustments will have to be made in order to stay competitive and fund that welfare state, wherever it is. And the French approach to that will be different from the Irish one which will different from the Italian one. But hard choices will have to be made in order to maintain the standard of living and it is there where I have often voiced my concern about the old continent’s versatility. Add to that the demographic and concurrent cultural challenges and it will tell you why opting for different approaches takes political courage, something which is not exactly omnipresent these days in Europe. That, more than anything else, will put a serious strain on the continent’s future. From Shea’s piece:

If Europeans didn't have the courage to cut their welfare spending and make their labor markets more flexible, the report said, an economic crisis would force such changes. And if politicians were crazy enough to ignore such a crisis, then collapse was possible. Not quite the end of Europe.

With my suggestion that the AEL should not be prosecuted:

The AEL should be arrested for breaking Dutch law. They are then free to introduce at their trial the claim that Free Speech is absolute and their rights to express their opinion was taken away, by the democratic process of The Netherlands which decided that Holocaust mockery was unprotected speech.

The Dutch government is free to argue that the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Arabic lands and Muslim world and the overwhelming presence of anti-Semitic cartoons, books, and forgeries, are an established link to the degree that they present a clear and present danger to Jews and other Holocaust victims, that to allow such cartoons reduces the civil rights of those persons, and therefore the suppression is not only allowable but desirable for the establishment of minority rights.

From cartoons to nukes, Andrew Sullivan connects.

(Here’s a bit I clipped last week when I didn’t have internet access. It’s a bit out of date, but I think the point is important, so I will indulge myself. )

Outgoing Liberal Social Development Minister Ken Dryden gave a speech he called “A Great National Endeavour”. Dryden is seen as a possible Liberal leadership candidate, so the speech was given some attention. My personal opinion is that it’s not much of a speech. Long on grand, ponderous statements and short on actual specifics. But that’s not the point. Dryden made a name for himself over the last few years by working hard to implement his vision for child care in Canada – the complete and total daycare system, which would someday rival the health care system. Now, I might see this as a bad thing given the state of our health care bureaucracy, but for Dryden it’s very much a Good Thing.

(As an aside, I imagined reading this speech that Dryden was directing his comments to future viewers of the “Greatest Canadian” competition on the CBC. “Forget Tommy Douglas, Ken Dryden was not only a legendary hockey goalie, lawyer and parliamentarian, but the Father of Canadian Day Care, the foundation of our national psyche today in 2050.” Swoooon. Anyway.)

No, what got me about the speech itself was something different, a form of historical revisionism which seems particularly common on the left side of Canadian politics. Here’s what Dryden says about the role of government in developing a national child care system:

“And really, there's not much of any importance that can be done alone. What if, 100 years ago, government put $50 in every family's pocket and told us to build a school system — if that's where we'd like to put our money. What if, 40 years ago — here's $100 for a health care system, if that's where you want to spend it. Where would we be today? Just because our schools and our health care are not all that we'd like them to be —imagine where we'd be without them. We can't build something great by divvying up the building fund and going our separate ways; just fending for ourselves.”

Wait a minute, hang on. That is what happened. I'm not sure where Dryden grew up, but it sure wasn't Canada.

100 years ago families decided it was important to send their kids to school. So they paid fees to the local school, which may have been combined with the church building, sponsored by local families (which morphed into school boards). What government assistance existed came in the form of support for the school board to varying degrees, but only later on.

Health care in particular did in fact develop on its own, thank you very much. You'd think reading this speech that our Health Care system sprung up in entirety 40 years ago, carved from nothing into the great and good system we have now. Not exactly. My grandfather was a young doctor during the depression. He used to tell stories of negotiating fees with patients, mixing up his own prescriptions (no chemists in rural Ontario), and generally worrying about how to care for patients with no resources. Public hospitals were run by charities or religious organizations, with some patchwork government assistance.

Government as we know it now came very late to the party. Look at his remarks - "We can't build something great by divvying up the building fund and going our separate ways; just fending for ourselves." Well, except that our "great" system was built in almost that exact fashion. Except for the building fund – there wasn’t one. Yesterday’s families didn’t have $100 a month to spend on health care, they had nothing.

I’m not going to argue people were better off “fending for themselves”, but that’s not the point. Dryden and company have decided that the Government is the best entity to deliver these services, which is fine. They’ve also convinced themselves that these services couldn't possibly exist without the Government, and that Canadian history backs them up. Which is not fine, and more importantly, not true.

And yet, I don’t get the sense that Dryden is even aware of the contradictions.

He’s too busy writing speeches about turning caring for your toddler into the next Great National Endeavour.

A transcript (in English) of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's speech in Berlin earlier this week in the Dutch NRC Handelsblad, entitled The Right to Offend. It comes with the usual unpolitical frankness that has become Hirsi Ali's trademark. Good for the NRC to run it.

UPDATE I: There is a political row brewing over this. Hirsi Ali's party, the right-leaning VVD, was caught by surprise over her comments:

Conservative (VVD) MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali has completely taken her party leader Jozias van Aartsen by surprise with her visit to Berlin. In the presence of many international media, she expressed unvarnished views of the Danish cartoons featuring the Islamic Prophet Mohammed.

Van Aartsen was surprised Thursday evening when a journalist in The Hague asked him what he thought of the speech. "Come back again later," he replied. Sources in The Hague believe Van Aartsen was completely unaware that his MP was to speak in Berlin. But Van Aarsten said Friday that "Ayaan has expressed the party position."

In Berlin, Hirsi Ali sharply criticised newspapers that did not reproduce the cartoons from fear, and politicians that have criticised their publication. She praised the Danish premier Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who did not bow to pressure from the Muslim world to curtail press freedom in his country. "I would wish that my premier had so much courage," said the Dutch MP of Christian democratic (CDA) leader Jan Peter Balkenende.

"I wonder whether this will help the debate in the Netherlands." The Prime Minister also said "we don't have much use" for Hirsi Ali's contribution.

Shame on those politicians who stated that publishing and re-publishing the drawings was ‘unnecessary’, ‘insensitive’, ‘disrespectful’ and ‘wrong’. I am of the opinion that Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark acted correctly when he refused to meet with representatives of tyrannical regimes who demanded from him that he limit the powers of the press. Today we should stand by him morally and materially. He is an example to all other European leaders. I wish my prime minister had Rasmussen’s guts.

Amid the avalanche of cartoon-related news and analysis there was a piece from Victor Davis Hanson that in my mind stood out as one of the best of the week and the Danish cartoons weren’t even the main theme of this superb column. It was about war and its inevitability, and how the West has unlearned to wage it:

Modern life in Western countries has also become so privileged and protected that it is hard to convince affluent suburbanites that shooting and bombing your way to power remains a norm in much of the world. Wealthy moderns too often imagine that issues of governance, religion, and tribal affiliation are solved through talk shows, lawsuits, or “60 Minutes” reports. Mostly, though, these conflicts abroad continue to be settled through violence.

It is hard to keep Americans focused on necessary sacrifices amidst the glare of contemporary leisure distractions and pleasures. It is difficult to ask taxpayers to forego some of their social entitlements to increase national investment in defense. It is painful to lose Western youth in awful landscapes such as Mogadishu or the Sunni Triangle for the abstraction of “freedom.”

The generation that lived through the great depression and that fought the Second World War has mostly passed away; their children are retiring and have very little appetite to man the barricades to argue the need for a pro-active and well-funded military. Their children in turn have grown up in the Cold War era which stood for prosperity, stability and peace through deterrence. And when the Soviet empire disappeared from the map and even the threat of war evaporated, all that was left was promoting liberal democracy and infinite consumption. As it happens, this will be the generation to make the calls this time around and as opposed to their grandparents, they haven't exactly been tested by a severe economic depression and the need to fight for survival.

I happen to know all about it as I am one of them. We got it for free, for nothing and we got an awful lot. And we are still getting it. A lot of wealth. And it's very hard to part with that.

NOTE: The debate about going to Afghanistan was not just a political battle. In an excellent and timely example of VDH's argument, now the Dutch military unions are questioning how an overseas deployment is going to impact their private lives:

Dutch military unions predicted on Wednesday many soldiers will opt out of the latest deployment to the southern province of Uruzgan in Afghanistan.

The AFMP and ACOM unions blamed the high number of overseas missions and moderate pay for the expected reluctance among troops to sign up for the Afghan mission.

Limited enthusiasm among the troops for the last mission cannot be attributed to the potential risks in Uruzgan, the unions said.

"For some this is the seventh, eight time they are being deployed overseas," AFMP chairman Wim van den Brug said. "That is a heavy burden on one's private life."

To the cartoon crisis, of course. More from Licia Corbella.

I followed Pieter's link to the Kate O'Beirne interview, and it certainly got me going over lunch.

It’s frustrating that we can’t have rational discussions about these issues. On one hand, we have the nutbars of feminism, the Susan Estrich’s of the world, who muddy this issue by seeing discrimination behind every bush. Then we have apologists like Kate O’Beirne, who take it on faith that human beings are unemotional and would never, ever make irrational decisions.

I agree with some of Kate's conclusions, but she far too-quickly dismisses the notion that there are organizations out there that would pay a woman less based purely on gender. I personally have worked for two such organizations, and I haven’t had many jobs in my life. Look at her central argument here:

“The basic economic point should first be appreciated. If it’s true that a woman with the exact same qualifications and experience would be willing to work for 76 cents to a man’s dollar, who would ever hire a man? You could hire an all female work force and bury the competition. There is no discriminatory wage gap.”

Well that’s just maddening. Her entire argument is based on the blithe assumption that the organization would place the same value on work performed by men and women, which is the entire point – they don’t. Even assuming you could find two individuals with the “exact same qualifications and experience”, the notion of workplace gender discrimination depends on the basic premise that women are less productive than men, even given the same qualifications and experience, and thus do not deserve the same pay. (Her argument also assumes that her theoretical hiring organization is run by automatons who do not make emotional decisions, which is true in exactly zero situations.)

I've been paid less based on my gender (and yes, that was the stated reason). I’ve also talked about this with other women in engineering, at companies large and small, and all agree that such discrimination is not rare at all. And no, it's not just women with children who see this. I don’t get very upset about it, and I can't see myself suing. It’s not an issue that occupies much of my mental or emotional energy.

But waving your hand and claiming that the problem doesn’t exist is not particularly helpful either. And loftily declaring that if I make less money than buddy in the next cubicle it's because of the “choices” I’ve made in life, well, that's infuriating, especially since I’m single with no kids.

Here's a very instructive excerpt from an editorial from yesterday's NRC Handelsblad, a Dutch newspaper known to take a moderate stance on most issues:

Just like all other multinational organizations (the UN for instance) is the EU calling for calm and mutual respect. That is very good, but the Danish justifiably feel that they’re now somewhat left behind. The union isn’t able to do much politically, certainly not in a situation where members do not want Brussels to interfere. But when it comes to a trade boycott, things are different. The measures taken by Iran against one member country should be interpreted as a sanction against the EU as a whole. That requires a suitable response.

NOTE: EU Referendum has more on the EU's failure to formulate an adequate response to those nations that are activley threatening some of its member states.

Michael Stickings of the well-written blog The Reaction is known to bring a more moderare point of view forward on most topics and so it is with his take on the cartoon crisis. Still, it appears that his conclusion isn't all that different from what many on the right have been arguing (see Fortuyn's position below):

We may demand the same of them, of course, but it seems to me that we must assume the burden of bringing freedom to the unfree and of explaining our way of life to those who simply don't understand it, let alone admire or long for it.

John Hawkins interviews Kate O'Beirne.

David Milgaard spent 22 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. His mother spent the entire time fighting for his release. The Milgaard case was bungled from the beginning, and everyone seemed to have known it.

Milgaard become the subject of a great Tragically Hip song, "Wheat Kings", which included the line

'..late breaking story on the CBC.
A nation whispers we always knew that he'd go free'

I don't know what that would do to me emotionally, but I'm willing to give David the benefit of the doubt. More to the point, I think we can safely say that rather than owing a debt to society, society owes a debt to him.

So why is he being forced to testify at an inquiry into his own wrongful conviction?

I don't know anything about Milgaard's health, and I don't care. How can we possibly compel him in this case? If you read the justice's comments, you'd think Milgaard was still the criminal in his eyes.

And the interests of public interest? Please.

How much is he really going to add here? How is his testimony going to shed light on the actions of the Crown?

" The West has to be able to define itself, show its strength, also when it comes to cultural and intellectual matters and be able to show that there are limits to what is acceptable to us. At the same time we can entertain a strong relationship with Islamic countries. Such an approach will contain the influence of Islam and it will strengthen the power and influence of Islamic nations that strive to separate church and state. It will curtail political adventurism in both western and Islamic countries "

[Pim Fortuyn, Against the Islamization of our Culture, 1997]

Here is the European Union:

Plans for a European press charter committing the media to "prudence" when reporting on Islam and other religions, were unveiled yesterday.

Franco Frattini, the European Union commissioner for justice, freedom and security, revealed the idea for a code of conduct in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. Mr Frattini, a former Italian foreign minister, said the EU faced the "very real problem" of trying to reconcile "two fundamental freedoms, the freedom of expression and the freedom of religion".

Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay issued a statement Wednesday noting that the drawings, which appeared in some European publications, have caused offence in Canada and abroad. "However, we condemn the violent protests that have occurred in some parts of the world, and find the attacks on foreign diplomatic missions particularly deplorable."

MacKay added that while freedom of expression is a legally enshrined principle in Canada, "it must be exercised responsibly."

I first want to make it very clear to people around the world that ours is a nation that believes in tolerance and understanding. In America we welcome people of all faiths. One of the great attributes of our country is that you're free to worship however you choose in the United States of America.

Secondly, we believe in a free press. We also recognize that with freedom comes responsibilities. With freedom comes the responsibility to be thoughtful about others. Finally, I have made it clear to His Majesty and he made it clear to me that we reject violence as a way to express discontent with what may be printed in a free press. I call upon the governments around the world to stop the violence, to be respectful, to protect property, protect the lives of innocent diplomats who are serving their countries overseas.

What about, "Freedom of the press is a core and inalienable, non-negotiable right of every American citizen and we - together with other democracies - will strive to ensure that every human being on this planet can freely enjoy the right to speak his or her mind, however offensive that sometimes may be to some others"

Does anyone wonder what Fortuyn would have said, knowing that he was able to deliver a very accurate definition of the problem and a guide to solving it almost ten years ago?

There are two worthwhile posts to get you started today. First check out Michelle Malkin's performance on Fox News Channel's Hannity and Colmes making the compelling point that this is not about Muslims in general, but about the radical elements that have successfully hijacked the issue for their benefit. There is more on that particular aspect to be found over at Tigerhawk, albeit less visually, where the discussion is focused on how the various uprisings on the "Arab Street" have been engineered.

The latter point has not been getting as much attention as it should have in my opinion. If we are really interested in finding a longer term solution to prevent this kind of unmitigated fury, then far more time and attention should be devoted to how Muslim sentiments are being manipulated and by whom. Of course, if we reply by putting yet more pressure on the hate-fomenters in Damascus and Tehran then that will provide them with more fodder to point to the West as the evil culprit. But destabilization of totalitarian regimes is never an easy sell at home and abroad, especially if there's no certainty over the attached cost and long-term outcomes. Let’s connect all the dots and try to figure out what price we are willing to pay.

Related Posts
Cartoons and Unity
A Roundtable about it all
A Formal Response from the Dutch
Hirsi Ali Weighs in
Where to Europe?
Euro Appeasement (2)
Euro Appeasement
The Cartoon Crisis, Continues
Danish Boycott, Christ and Freedom (2)
A Cartoonist Speaks
Danish Boycott, Christ and Freedom
That Danish Boycott

Posted at 12:00 AM by Pieter Dorsman | Permalink | Basic Freedoms ~ | Immigration | TrackBack (0)