Was the State Department story a hoax?

If this turns out to be true, I may give up blogging, or at least any blogging that is dependent on mainstream news sources. There is the possibility that the ABC story that VFR and other sites linked yesterday, quoting a State Department spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus on the cartoon controversy, may have been a fraud. ABC reported that she said: “Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable. We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices.”

To say that the cartoons were “not acceptable” was to side with the Muslims who are threatening beheading and Holocaust over this. I expressed my shock at America’s betrayal of Europe in this standoff with Islam.

However, the website “Little Green Footballs” points out that the State Department statements from yesterday were variously attributed to three different persons, which makes the whole thing seem very questionable. LGF then quotes a press briefing direct from the State Department’s website:

We believe, for example in our country, that people from different religious backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, national backgrounds add to our strength as a country. And it is important to recognize and appreciate those differences. And it is also important to protect the rights of individuals and the media to express a point of view concerning various subjects. So 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. We may—like I said, we may not agree with those points of view, we may condemn those points of view but we respect and emphasize the importance that those individuals have the right to express those points of view.

While is still highly objectionable for the U.S. spokesman to “condemn” these points of view, his emphasis on the idea that people have the right to express these views of view even if they offend Muslims puts the whole statement in a different light than the ABC quote of Janelle Hironimus, which simply said that the cartoons were “not acceptable.” The “condemn” remark seems to become part of a cowardly diplomatic balancing act, rather than an outright betrayal.

But even that is not entirely clear. As I see it, we should not be balancing at all between Muslim fanatics and Western society. Here is what our government should have said:

“As we understand it, these cartoons were not published in order to attack or defame Islam, but to establish the principle that things that offend Muslims can be published in the West, just as things that offend Christians are routinely published in the West. We support the right of European newspapers to publish these cartoons, and we condemn the Arab and Muslim governments that have stoked up murderous passions among their people over this issue. If Muslims threaten boycotts and mass murder every time something is published in a Western newspaper that offends their religious sensibilities, the question is raised whether Muslims can be a part of Western society at all.”

That of course is my fantasy of The Way Things Ought To Be. However, while we could not expect such a statement from the U.S. government in the world as it now exists, we could have expected that the U.S. government would at least not actively condemn the cartoons. The qualifier that the U.S. supports the right to publish the same cartoons that the U.S. condemns is therefore still not enough to clear the U.S. government of the charge of betrayal. By condemning the cartoons, the U.S. has taken the side of the Muslims.

In any case, we will have to wait for the truth of this bizarre story to emerge. One puzzle is, if the story was a hoax (and the story was all over the media yesterday), why hasn’t the State Department taken steps to clear it up? Did spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus (who does exist, as I’ve confirmed from a google search) say what was attributed to her, or not? Today’s Houston Chronicle is still attributing to her the same statement I quoted yesterday.

Paul Cella writes:

A bizarre story indeed. President Bush will probably have to address this controversy eventually—then we will have a clear demonstration of the nascent dhimmitude of our own government—or, mirable dictu, a repudiation of it.

It may be worth reminding your readers that it was the Danish king who in 1943 declared that, as the Nazis wanted the Danish Jews to wear yellow stars, all Danes would wears stars. What a despicable thing to hang such a people out to dry, as so many—including, perhaps, our own government—would have us do today.

The Danes have 500 troops in Iraq, by the way. I’ve been drinking Danish beer all weekend.

My reply:

I think Bush is already dhimmi. Look at what he said about the Hamas election, as quoted in Diana West’s column:

“The people are demanding honest government. The people want services. They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which they can get a decent education and they can find health care.”

This is a pure dhimmi consciousness, filtered through a uniquely American combination of emotion-based evangelicalism and WASP paternalism. No matter what the Muslims do, as long as it can be constructed as an expression of people’s desires (their desires as expressed through elections, or their desires as expressed through their crossing illegally into America), then what they are doing is good. Palestinians voting for Hamas, like Mexicans invading America, are not doing anything objectionable, but are simply seeking those basic, necessary things that all humans want, especially the well-being of their children.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 04, 2006 02:53 PM | Send