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Buchanan sides with the Muslims
Writing at the anarchist libertarian website lewrockwell.com, Patrick Buchanan comes out 100 percent against the European papers that published the cartoons of Muhammad, seeing the act as an anti-religious provocation by secular modernists. The problem with this view is that, while Christianity really has been trashed on an ongoing basis by secular modernists, the majority of the Muhammad cartoons are anodyne and devoid of content. They are images that any Western newspaper—secular or religious, liberal or conservative—ought to be able to print without even thinking about it. Three of the cartoons have content critical of Islam. One of these has the joke about Paradise running out of virgins for suicide bombers. If that’s not a fit subject for satire, then nothing is. The two remaining cartoons portray Muhammad with a turban shaped as a bomb, and Muhammad in a fierce posture brandishing a knife. How can any Western patriot object to these images? Almost every page of the book Muhammad wrote is filled with threats and commands of violent death against infidels, i.e., against us. The 9/11 terrorists and every other suicide terrorist have been acting in the name of the god of whom Muhammad said he was the spokesman. Moreover, according to the Muslims themselves, Muhammad’s book commands the death by beheading of anyone who slanders him, and they proudly reel off the list of the assassinations that he ordered. According to the most authoritative and respected Muslim sources on the life of Muhammad, some of those assassinations were of people in Medina who merely criticized Muhammad; one of the victims was a woman who had written satires about him. It was through the murder of his critics that Muhammad established his absolute rule over Medina.
The point is, if such images of Muhammad, admittedly offensive to Muslims, cannot be printed, then nothing offensive to Muslims can be published, anywhere, any time. Thus for the West to do what Buchanan demands would be to surrender to the power of Islam. Buchanan writes: “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.” Focused as always on his bugaboo of U.S. and Western involvement in the Mideast, an involvement which in his mind is solely about helping the illegitimate state of Israel, he doesn’t notice that the Muslims are threatening to destroy the most fundamental liberties of Europeans in Europe, not to mention their lives. Email entry |