A terribly disappointing response by Le Pen

Like Patrick Buchanan, like the deranged Ralph Peters, Jean-Marie Le Pen seems so hostile to the secular liberal elites of Europe that he cannot see that the handful of newspapers that printed the Muhammad cartoons are, in this moment of time, the very people who are standing up against Islam and so helping the modern world see the meaning of Islam as it has never been seen before, and so leading the way toward Western resistance to Islam. Instead of supporting them for defying Muslim supremacism, he condemns them for insulting Islam. Judging by what he’s written below (translation supplied by our kind translator), this supposed leader of French nationalism would put the Europeans under the thumb of the Muslims. Thanks a lot, M. Le Pen.

The argument over the cartoons of Mohammed is a good indicator of the state of our society. On the one hand, we have those who believe in nothing and favor the absolute right to mock the foundations of civilization. On the other hand, we have those who seek the respect of believers, but only if they are Muslims—either because they are fighting against Islamophobia, or they have commercial interests, or simply out of fear of violence.

Believers have the right to be respected in their beliefs, be they Muslims, Christians or Jews. If you condemn—and rightly so—the hurtful cartoons of the prophet of Islam, all the more should you condemn the base and permanent caricatures of the Christian God incarnate.

The necessary limits of freedom of expression (concerning the most intimate part of the human being and of one’s private life) cannot be a one-way street.

Carl Simpson writes that Buchanan and Le Pen are wrong both in their condemnation of the liberals who published the cartoons and in their support for the Muslims:

This whole issue is most interesting. This rift between conservatives like yourself, Le Pen and Buchanan tell me that there is a need to define the point at which we stop supporting western liberals—with the acknowledgment that we cannot engage in an alliance, even on a temporary basis, with Islam.

For me, that point is treason. The cartoonists at Jyllands-Posten, whatever they are, have not advocated treason or engaged in treasonous actions as I see it. As much as I can relate and understand their fury at the western left, I think that Buchanan and Le Pen have made a very serious error here. If the last reader on the previous thread is right (and I suspect he is), it’s unfair to label the cartoonists and the Jyllands-Posten as part of the blasphemous left to begin with. The genuinely leftist papers both here and in Europe have refused to print the cartoons—just as Buchanan and, sadly, Le Pen wish.

Buchanan and Le Pen are evidently still holding fast to one of the big lies that has been propagated regarding Islam for many decades now in every school in the western world: Islam is a great monotheistic religion, a relative of Christianity and Judaism, which should accordingly be given a certain amount of deference over a pantheistic religion. This is nothing but a liberal fallacy. Islam’s actions over the last 1400 years tell a very different story—one that liberals in the west refuse to face but is now revealed thanks to the work of Bat Yeor, Srdja Trifkovic, Dr. Bostom, and others—not to mention the violence of the Muslim reaction to the cartoons itself. In light of the truth about the last 1400 years, Islam is no more deserving of deference than is Communism, Jim Jones’ “People’s Temple” cult or the Thuggi of India. We should judge Islam on our own terms, not on theirs.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 09, 2006 07:30 PM | Send