I don't think we have any discussion about the Danish Muhammad cartoons....

Muslim states resolved, through these many demonstrations, to pressure through a program of joint Islamic action, international institutions, including the U.N., to criminalize insults of Islam and its prophet.

...The Organization of Islamic Conference's goal is to inhibit criticism of Islamic jihadism by threats of violence. It's beginning to work. On February 9, the European Union called for a voluntary code of conduct to avoid offending Muslims. On the same day, Kofi Annan agreed with an OIC proposal mandating that a revised U.N. Human Rights Council "prevent instances of intolerance discrimination, incitement of hatred and violence . . . against religions, prophets, and beliefs." The language is intentionally very broad.

This would enforce censorship by U.N. members and NGOs (nongovernmental organizations there) against purported defamation of Muslims in print and other forms of speech.

That phrase does at least allow us to shout (from the rooftops!) "But Nabisco, the question isn't that!" But scroll up the thread and you'll see that he also said:

"This is a big project, but it's the only thing that can work. Rehabilitation is the only option here, because you can't imprison or execute an entire culture."

The only option: he just won't look beyond "reform them or kill them all", the two sides of the coin of interventionism.

We are living with the consequences of Rummy's 9/11 memo "go massive, sweep it all up, things related and not", but that doesn't mean we need to accept its insanity as any kind of sanity.

[A]nything we do will have some effect on shaping that culture.

Let's talk practicalities, not abstractions. What would it look like, in this case, to "co-exist peacefully with a culture, acknowledging that differences exist and doing nothing about them?" What path of action on our part will have no effect whatsoever, no influence at all? Do we continue to import oil, and thus indirectly support the people who benefit from that? Do we cease to import oil, and thus indirectly pull the rug out from their economies? How do we react when they seek to influence our behavior? Do these cartoons constitute "doing nothing" about those differences? Or do they constitute "doing something?" Do you really imagine there is an answer to these questions that is actually neutral? Do you really imagine there is anything we can do that will not shape and affect other people? And you're the one who thinks I'm too much of an individualist and not enough of a collectivist!

I mean, here's the deal: you're trying to make my point much simpler and blunter than it is. You're trying to pretend that I'm in favor of "correcting" another culture, and you're trying to pretend I'm advocating active, forceful steps to do that. But all I've said, Momus, is that our actions have influence, and that we should be making the best of that influence. These cartoons have influence. And the only distinction I made was between using that influence in ways that help achieve good things and ways that help achieve bad ones. That's not a binary. That's a spectrum of consequences to our actions -- consequences to every action -- and a recommendation that we be aware of those consequences, and act in a spirit of hope rather than cynicism.

And I'm seriously going to ask that you quit pretending I mean more than that, because that's the part here where you're being an absolute asshole. The two things we're saying here are completely compatible. If you ask me what I think would "help" with those "problems," I think my vision would be very close to yours -- it would involve allowing other cultures to develop without our leaning on them to conform to our tastes. I've never said otherwise. But our actions have effects nonetheless, and we have to acknowledge that. We have to aim those actions the right way, because we can't just step out of the picture.

But you're (again, again!) defining this so that the only possibility is intervention! Can't you see how faulty your logic is here? Because the US has influence everywhere in the world, it has a choice to use that influence in the form of good or bad intervention. But influence is compatible with tolerance, intervention is not. Democracy must be won by the blood of the people who fight for it, not by an alien power (no matter how "influential" coming in and shedding someone else's blood to impose it from above.

Both kinds of intervention you outline (war, reform) mean walking right into the trap that Bin Laden and his ilk have set for America. Just as Al Qaeda used the judo technique of directing American energy (in the form of passenger jets) against America, so they've been using the same technique ever since: they've goaded the US into aggressive responses and then used that energy for their own purposes of recruitment and radicalisation. Al Qaeda weren't that keen on Saddam either, as you may recall. They were chased out of their training grounds in Afghanistan only to see the whole nation of Iraq become a training ground with real live American targets.

If you followed the link Blount supplied to Nat Hentoff's column in the Voice, you'll have read the story of how the Danish cartoons are being used in exactly the same way: by engineering big spectacular media events, organisations like the OIC hope to polarize and extremize public opinion:

"The role of the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), representing 57 Muslim states, in creating a climate for violent confrontation over the cartoons [was shown when] the OIC set the stage for anti–free speech demonstrations at its extraordinary summit in Mecca in December 2005. The Muslim states resolved, through these many demonstrations, to pressure through a program of joint Islamic action, international institutions, including the U.N., to criminalize insults of Islam and its prophet."

What the Bush administration and radical Islamists have in common is the belief that you just spelled out: that the Americans and the Islamists must totally meddle in each other's affairs, including their legal and political systems.

Because the US has influence everywhere in the world, it has a choice to use that influence in the form of good or bad intervention.

No, it has a choice to use that influence as good or bad influence. The two words do not mean the same thing, as you point out: "influence is compatible with tolerance, intervention is not." So why are you pretending they're inseparable in that sentence up above?

Democracy must be won by the blood of the people who fight for it, not by an alien power (no matter how "influential" coming in and shedding someone else's blood to impose it from above.

Oh wait, it's worse: now "influence" necessarily means "bloodshed!" I'm pretty sure the original kind of influence we were talking about was "cartoons."

Both kinds of intervention you outline (war, reform)

Umm, what? Are you actually reading my posts, or just scanning them for things to pretend you disagree with? I haven't advocated a single method of intervention. I haven't even advocated intervention. All I've said is that when making decisions about things like cartoons, we should keep in mind whether they foster peace or division. And all I said that's led you to such depths of ridiculousness is that EVEN AT LEAST BUSH would claim to be more interested in fostering peace than fostering division.

You still have a bunch of questions to answer if you want to argue about this: what would it actually look like -- in concrete, practical terms -- for the west to take a stance that had absolutely no influence on the rest of the world?

(As linked to way up above) - the fruits of the last concerted Western effort to 'reform' muslim culture:

"The wartime reports from German and Austro-Hungarian officials also confirm independent evidence that the origins and evolution of the genocide had little to do with World War I “Armenian provocations”. Emphasis is placed, instead, on the larger pre-war context dating from the failure of the mid-19th century Ottoman Tanzimat reform efforts. These reforms, initiated by the declining Ottoman Empire (i.e., in 1839 and 1856) under intense pressure from the European powers, were designed to abrogate the repressive laws of dhimmitude, to which non-Muslim (primarily Christian) minorities, including the Armenians, had been subjected for centuries, following the Turkish jihad conquests of their indigenous homelands.

Led by their patriarch, the Armenians felt encouraged by the Tanzimat reform scheme, and began to deluge the Porte (Ottoman seat of government) with pleas and requests, primarily seeking governmental protection against a host of mistreatments, particularly in the remote provinces. Between 1850 and 1870, alone, 537 notes were sent to the Porte by the Armenian patriarch characterizing numerous occurrences of theft, abduction, murder, confiscatory taxes, and fraud by government officials. These entreaties were largely ignored, and ominously, were even considered as signs of rebelliousness. For example, British Consul (to Erzurum) Clifford Lloyd reported in 1890,

Discontent, or any description of protest is regarded by the local Turkish Local Government as seditious.

He went on to note that this Turkish reaction occurred irrespective of the fact that ”..the idea of revolution..” was not being entertained by the Armenian peasants involved in these protests.

Roderick Davison has observed that under the Shari’a the “..infidel gavours [“dhimmis”, “rayas”]” were permanently relegated to a status of “inferiority” and subjected to a “contemptuous half-toleration”. Davison further maintained that this contempt emanated from “an innate attitude of superiority”, and was driven by an “innate Muslim feeling”, prone to paroxysms of “open fanaticism”. Sustained, vehement reactions to the 1839 and 1856 Tanzimat reform acts by large segments of the Muslim population, led by Muslim spiritual leaders and the military, illustrate Davison’s point. Perhaps the most candid and telling assessment of the doomed Tanzimat reforms, in particular the 1856 Act, was provided by Mustafa Resid, Ottoman Grand Vizier at six different times between 1846-58. In his denunciation of the reforms, Resid argued the proposed “complete emancipation” of the non-Muslim subjects, appropriately destined to be subjugated and ruled, was “entirely contradictory” to “the 600 year traditions of the Ottoman Empire”. He openly proclaimed the “complete emancipation” segment of the initiative as disingenuous, enacted deliberately to mislead the Europeans, who had insisted upon this provision. Sadly prescient, Resid then made the ominous prediction of a “great massacre” if equality was in fact granted to non-Muslims.

Despite their “revolutionary” advent, and accompanying comparisons to the ideals of the French Revolution, the CUP’s “Young Turk” regime eventually adopted a discriminatory, anti-reform attitude toward non-Muslims within the Ottoman Empire. During an August 6, 1910 speech in Saloniki, Mehmed Talat, pre-eminent leader of the Young Turks disdainfully rejected the notion of equality with “gavours” , arguing that it “…is an unrecognizable ideal since it is inimical with Sheriat [Shari’a] and the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of Muslims…”. Roderick Davison notes that in fact “..no genuine equality was ever attained..”, re-enacting the failure of the prior Tanzimat reform period. As a consequence, he observes, the CUP leadership “…soon turned from equality…to Turkification…” Indeed, an influential member of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, Sheik Abd-ul-Hack, a “progressive” Young Turk, made this declaration writing in a Parisian Muslim review, in August, 1912:

Yes! The Musulman religion is in open hostility to all your world of progress. Understand, you European observers, that a Christian, whatever his position may be, by the mere fact of his being a Christian is regarded by us as a blind man lost to all sense of human dignity. Our reasoning with regard to him is as simple as it is definitive. We say: the man whose judgment is so perverted as to deny the existence of a one and only God, and to make up gods of different sorts, can only be the meanest expression of human degradation; to speak to him would be a humiliation for our intelligence and an insult to the grandeur of the Master of the Universe. The presence of such miscreants among us is the bane of our existence; their doctrine is a direct insult to the purity of our faith; contact with them is a defilement of our bodies; any relation with them a torture to our souls. Though detesting you, we have condescended to study your political institutions and your military organization. Over and above the new weapons that Providence procures for us through your agency, you have yourselves rekindled, the inextinguishable faith of our heroic martyrs. Our Young Turks, our Babis, our new Brotherhoods, all our sects, under various forms, are inspired by the same idea; the same necessity of moving forward. Towards what end? Christian civilization? Never! Islam is the one great international family. All true believers are brothers. A community of feeling and of faith binds them in mutual affection. It is for the Caliph to facilitate these relations and to rally the Faithful under the sacerdotal standard.

During the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid, the Ottoman Turks massacred over 200,000 Armenians between 1894-96. This was followed, under the Young Turk regime, by the Adana massacres of 25,000 Armenians in 1909, and the first formal genocide of the 20th century, when in 1915 alone, an additional 600,000 to 800,000 Armenians were slaughtered.

Contemporary accounts from European diplomats make clear that these brutal massacres were perpetrated in the context of a formal jihad against the Armenians who had attempted to throw off the yoke of dhimmitude by seeking equal rights and autonomy. For example, the Chief Dragoman (Turkish-speaking interpreter) of the British embassy reported regarding the 1894-96 massacres:

[The perpetrators] are guided in their general action by the prescriptions of the Sheri [Sharia] Law. That law prescribes that if the “rayah” [dhimmi] Christian attempts, by having recourse to foreign powers, to overstep the limits of privileges allowed them by their Mussulman [Muslim] masters, and free themselves from their bondage, their lives and property are to be forfeited, and are at the mercy of the Mussulmans. To the Turkish mind the Armenians had tried to overstep those limits by appealing to foreign powers, especially England. They therefore considered it their religious duty and a righteous thing to destroy and seize the lives and properties of the Armenians."

"As has now been well established by the Western press, five months ago a vicious right-wing propaganda rag in Denmark, possibly edited by a cryogenically preserved Nazi collaborator, sought specifically to denigrate Islam by commissioning a series of unspeakably horrible caricatures that baselessly portrayed Islam as having a tendency towards violence and intolerance.

Now, Muslims are not normally a people to congregate in mass protest and burn flags, hurl stones or break things. But this unprovoked act of cultural aggression (coming, as it did, out of the blue and occurring in Islam’s heartland, Denmark) was simply too much to take. Therefore, after five months of consideration, it was decided to make an exception for this case, and spontaneous protests broke out..."

I hope Nabisco realises that responding to my polite, reasoned arguments by calling me a "giant asshole" opens him up to potentially violent protest from Momus fans all over the world. Momism doesn't allow that kind of representation of its prophet.

Then: asshole!

Nabs: You are not: shit, but (I can't believe I'M saying this) let it go dood.

I think that was actually for me, but then again, I'm pretty sure the theme from The Jeffersons was about me

A Manifesto Against Islamic Totalitarianism

via tailrank
http://tinyurl.com/ja9uc

I think we'll be seeing people die in the coming days. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field.

..After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat....

Don't we all wish.

...the more instructive lesson was the one to be learned from the mush-mouthed response on the part of the intimidated champions of liberty in London, Toronto, New York, and Washington. Here was a coordinated attack on the freedoms of thought and expression fundamental to the existence of a liberal society and the workings of democratic government, and where were the public voices willing to say so? On sabbatical or leave of absence, mumbling apologies, sending their regrets.

...By February 14, a day on which the armed resistance in Iraq murdered another 18 people (three U.S. soldiers and fifteen Iraqis, among them an army officer and a policeman), I'd been told so often about the awfulness of the Danish cartoons (more destructive than roadside bombs, as terrible as the sinking of oil tankers) that I looked them up on the Internet. Not surprisingly, I didn't find them offensive. My bias and judgment having been formed in the secular realm of thought -- i.e., the one that we presumably value and wish to preserve, also the one that defends the Muslim minority in India against persecutions by the Hindu majority -- I thought the cartoons mildly amusing at best, in no way vicious or grotesque, well within the perimeter of what both Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin would have seen as fair use or ridicule in the service of political argument. The jokes were in line with what little is known of the prophet's life as terrorist, libertine, and religious visionary. ...

...if I'm wary of religious belief in any an all of its ardent emissions, it's because I remember, as did the authors of the American Constitution, the vast numbers of people crucified -- also burned, tortured, beheaded, drawn, quartered, imprisoned, and enslaved -- on one of another of its ceremonial altars (Protestant, Muslim, Catholic, Aztec) over the course of the last 2,000 years. Nor do I know why I must respect somebody merely for the fact of his or her belief, as if the attachment to a belief, in and of itself and without regard either to its subject or its object, somehow bestows a state of grace. ...

The vapid atmospheres of political correctness apparently haven't yet gagged all the public voices in Europe, possibly because in Europe the Muslim protests against the abomination of the Danish cartoons were more clearly seen for what they were -- less the spontaneous cry of a wounded religious sensitivity than a well-organized coup de theatre intended to achive a secular political result. ...

Jasper Gerard, a columnist writing in the Sunday Times in London, touched upon the unhappy truth that the American consensus of responsible opinion does its best to hide behind the screens of tolerance and diversity; "Islam is protected by an invisible blasphemy law," Gerard said. "It's called fear."

Which is the same law that in the materialist societies of the nominally democratic West protects the lies told by the prophets of the apocalypse (statesmen, generals, radio talk-show hosts) who promote the specious war on terror in order to persuade the customers of their victimhood, suppress the blasphemy of history, and silence the heresies of reason.

Yea, what was up with Stewart and Colbert last night... they were all acting like they were on speed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4827294.stm

"The Church in Wales has recalled 500 copies of its magazine featuring a cartoon caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad."

The National Council of Churches in Singapore, which also had requested a ban, planned lectures to refute aspects of the film and the book on which it is based. The censorship board gave the movie a NC16 rating, barring viewers under 16, arguing that "only a mature audience will be able to discern and differentiate between fact and fiction."