SecretAgentMan's Dossier

Adjusting Muslim Culture

Via Relapsed Catholic, we learn that Al-Jazeera is angry at a Danish newspaper's contest for offensive cartoons about Muhammad. At the end of the article -- after Al-Jazeera has documented the disgusting unwillingness of the Danish government to "take action" against the offenders, and worries that the contest will spark a new crop of anti-Islamic mobs slaughtering Muslims in the streets of the West -- we're treated to the standard Mark1Mod0 Moral Superiority Tag-Line: "The Islamic religion does not allow offensive remarks by both Muslims and Non-Muslims."

By both? That's an interesting turn of phrase. One wonders if it might be called a "Dhimmian slip." I wonder, since it appears that Islam allows offensive remarks to be made by Muslims, who take full advantage of the privilege:

Like this.

And this.

And this.

And this.

Or all of these.

There are other interesting Dhimmian slips in this article, such as the headline: "Has Defaming the Prophet become ‘Freedom of Speech?'" As though we must all agree that some universal law has already been passed requiring everyone to admit that Muhammad actually was a prophet.

Al-Jazeera says "the Qur'an, the Muslims' holy book orders them to conduct discussions in an orderly and respectable manner. It prohibits ridiculing the Jews/Christians or the Prophets." I have no doubt that the anti-Semitic authors and cartoonists who fill Muslim media with vile and hateful images of Jews believe they're not ridiculing anyone and that their behavior is orderly and respectable. After all, if Jews really are the moral equivalent of Nazis, the hooky-nosed secret dominators of the world, who make matzos from the blood of gentile children, then surely it's respectable and orderly to point that out. So, welcome to the world of secular liberty, kids, where opinions are like . . . er, uh . . . ubiquitous, and where smugly claiming to "tolerate respectable opinions" is as much of an answer to the problem of free speech as saying "we only shoot the bad people" is an answer to the problem of how best to enforce the law.

I don't like newspapers mocking Islam any more than I like them mocking Christianity. But if I used Al-Jazeera's yardstick to measure things, then every time a Muslim refers to "Isa" a/ka "Jesus," as a prophet I'd have to conclude that he's violating the "basic right" of my true faith to be recognized as the true faith. When Islamic scholars paint the crusades as nothing but a series of imperialist war crimes, they're "insulting" my culture. And apparently I must demand that they be punished; if the police should be used to "ensure respect" for Muslim immigrants, surely the police can be used to "ensure respect" for Christian non-immigrants.

The result of that perspective is civil war, as Christians and Muslims fight to control the state in order to "ensure respect" for our true faiths. It's the paradigm that drove the West into secularism to begin with, and I haven't seen anything suggesting that Islam has a better alternative. It's been claimed that Islam offers true tolerance, the dawn of a golden age when common values can shared without exclusion or oppression. Al-Jazeera's petulant editorial indicates that Islam has a lot of adjustment to do before it can prosper outside of a Muttawa-maintained hothouse of double standards and seething grievances.