Islamic Fundamentalism
The Danish writer Kare Bluitgen couldn’t
find an illustrator for a children’s book she was writing on the
life of Muhammad. Illustrators were terrified that Islamic fundamentalists
would kill them if they depicted Muhammad. Bluitgen went to Flemming
Rose, a Copenhagen newspaper editor and former Middle East war correspondent—a
man that the New York Times said was known for his, "fearlessness and
trenchant views on immigration." Rose disdained self-censorship and
the chilling effects of Rushdiesque fatwa. His newspaper, Jyllands-Posten,
had previously published satirical cartoons about Christians and Jews,
including a cartoon of the Star of David in the shape of a bomb.
So Rose asked 25 cartoonists to draw Muhammad, "how
they saw him." On September 30 he published the 12 that were submitted,
including one by the cartoonists who drew the Star of David previously.
The most offensive of the cartoons showed Muham-mad with a turban fuse.
Since then, more than twenty people have died in Islamic
riots that have spread from Denmark to the Middle East, Africa and Indonesia.
In response, Rose said he would re-publish an Iranian contest of Holocaust
cartoons and then went on indefinite vacation.
Last Wednesday the Chief Executive of the European
Union said that core European values were under attack, and that leaders
should stand up and fight for freedom of speech, fight against murderous
riots and fatwa.
And it is time for those who value Western liberties
to stand up and say that we will not be cowed, we will not whimper in
fear of your anger, we will not castrate our freedom because you can’t
take a joke. If we don’t strand up, we will go the way of the Romans,
who grew too fat off empire to fight off the Visigoths.
I really became scared when I learned as a
child that the Romans had flushing toilets. The barbarian hordes destroyed
a civilization that had flushing toilets? They plunged a society with
republican government, litigators, and grape boys into the stench of
the Medieval? Then I learned of the purge-atoriums. That’s what
really sent me under the sheets. This was an advanced society—they
had eating disorders, for god’s sake. But still, barbarians came
and destroyed their toilets. Then, the best a second-born could do was
flagellate himself in a dank monastery and pray that death was better
than life. And so I knew fear. For if it could happen to them, it could
happen to us.
Which brings me to Islamic Fundamentalism. You see,
our liberal democracy is better, not different, from fundamentalist
theocracy. We are the Romans; flouncing about the vineyards of Sonoma,
debating issues of state behind Ionic columns, gorging at Caligulan
fêtes. Our women are liberated. Our women have Joycelyn Elders,
tenure, and vibrator parties. So we gross the Islamists out. We offend
their patriarchal dignity. We beam Oprah into the stratosphere, from
which a hacker in purdah can snatch it out of the sky. We publish cartoons
of their prophet.
I have no problem with the moderate Muslims,
the playboys of Beirut, the frustrated Nasserists, those that prefer
their prophet to mine, and leave me alone. I am speaking of the barbarian
subset, the Shar’iast murderers, who stone women for adultery,
kill raped sisters to preserve family dignity, and detonate old art.
They take the sword of Damocles far too literally. They goad their children
into murder and celebrate their death with martyr posters.
We looked the other way as long their behavior was
kept behind the curtains of a far-away land. It was nice that there
existed people who didn’t dress in Gap. They were exotic, like
an engraving in a musty travel book. We thought them quaintly anachronistic,
a little sententious at times, but essentially, fundamentalist manqué.
And then they came to smash our toilets.
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