Patrick Buchanan: Secularist Stupidity and Religious Wars

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   Find this article at:  http://www.lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan36.html 

  Secularist Stupidity and Religious Wars

  by Patrick J. Buchanan

  February 7, 2006

   Excerpt:

  What hypocrisy. When it comes to what Germans are most sensitive 
about,  Hitler and the Holocaust, they are ruthless censors. British 
historian David Irving  has spent three months in a Viennese prison 
awaiting trial on Feb. 20 for  speeches he made 15 years ago in 
Austria. Skeptics and deniers of the Holocaust  are prosecuted, fined 
and imprisoned in Europe with the enthusiastic  endorsement of the 
European press.  

  START:

  That demagogues and agitators are exploiting those cartoons of 
Mohammed to  advance a war of civilizations and expel Europeans from 
the Middle East seems  undeniable. 

  But that does not excuse the paralyzing stupidity of that Danish 
paper in  running those cartoons - or the arrogant irresponsibility 
of European newspapers  in plastering those cartoons all over their 
front pages. 

  The storm first broke last September, when Jyllands-Posten published 
12  caricatures of Mohammed, including a lampoon of the Prophet with 
a terrorist bomb  as a turban. In the Islamic faith, any depiction of 
the face of Mohammed is  forbidden. 

  The Danish paper knew this. It published the cartoons to protest 
"the  rejection of modern, secular society" by Muslims. The cartoons 
were thus a defiant  provocation. And they succeeded. 

  The Middle East responded with a boycott of Danish foods and goods. 
But when,  in the name of press solidarity, Le Soir and Le Monde in 
Paris, El Pais in  Madrid and Die Welt in Berlin republished the 
cartoons on page one, Islam  exploded. For this was an in-your-face 
declaration by the secularist media of the  European Union that it 
will exercise its right to insult any God, any Prophet,  any faith, 
whenever it so chooses. 

  "Enough lessons from these reactionary bigots," said Serge Faubert, 
editor of  Le Soir. "Just because the Quran bans images of Mohammed 
doesn't mean  non-Muslims have to submit to this." 

  Faubert, however, is not a Danish soldier in the Shi'ite sector of 
Iraq.  Innocents will pay the price of his heroism. 

  The U.S. State Department seemed to empathize with Muslim rage, 
stating that  "inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is 
unacceptable." But,  within hours, State had retreated to neutral 
ground: "While we share the offense  that Muslims have taken at these 
images, we at the same time vigorously defend  the right of 
individuals to express points of view." 

  As of today the Danish consulate in Beirut has been burned, Danish 
embassies  have been stormed, and Danes are fleeing the Middle East. 
Europeans are  getting out of the West Bank, Gaza and Beirut, where 
mobs are attacking embassies  and Christian churches. 

  Islamic countries have recalled ambassadors from Copenhagen. People 
have been  injured and property destroyed in mob assaults as far away 
as Indonesia.  Relations between the West and the Islamic world have 
been dealt another rupturing  blow. 

  And for what? What was the purpose of this juvenile idiocy by the 
Europress?  Is this what freedom of the press is all about - the 
freedom to insult the  faith of a billion people and start a 
religious war? 

  Can Europeans be that ignorant of the power of the press to inflame 
when  Bismarck's editing of just a few words in the Ems telegram 
ignited the  Franco-Prussian war? Did Europeans learn nothing from 
the Salman Rushdie episode? Or the  firestorm that gripped the 
Islamic world when Christian ministers in the  United States called 
Mohammed a "terrorist"? 

  European governments are wringing their hands over the rage and 
violence  unleashed, but they seem paralyzed. What is the matter? Why 
cannot they denounce  press irresponsibility while defending press 
freedom? Even friends of the West  like Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, 
President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Tayyip  Erdogan in Turkey have 
denounced these cartoons as insults to Islamic values  and deeply 
damaging to Western interests. 

  British Foreign Minister Jack Straw deplored republication of the 
cartoons as  "insensitive ... disrespectful ... wrong." But German 
Interior Minister  Wolfgang Shauble haughtily dissented, "Here, in 
Europe, governments have nothing to  say about which publisher 
publishes what." 

  What hypocrisy. When it comes to what Germans are most sensitive 
about,  Hitler and the Holocaust, they are ruthless censors. British 
historian David Irving  has spent three months in a Viennese prison 
awaiting trial on Feb. 20 for  speeches he made 15 years ago in 
Austria. Skeptics and deniers of the Holocaust  are prosecuted, fined 
and imprisoned in Europe with the enthusiastic  endorsement of the 
European press. 

  Nor are we all that different. Sen. Trent Lott was ousted as 
majority leader  for a birthday-party compliment to 100-year-old 
Strom Thurmond. Atlanta Braves  pitcher John Rocker was almost 
lynched for saying he considers New York a  social pigsty. There were 
demands that Rocker undergo psychiatric counseling. 

  We have "speech codes" in colleges and "hate crimes" laws to protect 
minorities from abusive remarks. But newspapers that hail these codes 
throw a blanket  of "artistic freedom" over scatological art that 
degrades religious symbols -  from putting a figure of Christ in a 
jar of urine to a "painting" of the  Virgin Mary surrounded by female 
genitalia and elephant dung that hung in a  Brooklyn museum. 

  What has happened in Europe is that the secular press, which loves 
to mock  the beliefs and symbols of religious faith, has now insulted 
a deadly serious  religion that answers insults with action.

   Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American 
Conservative. He  is also the author of seven books, including Where 
the Right Went Wrong, and  A Republic Not An Empire.  
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