Tell one audience one thing and another audience another, as Arafat did in talking peace in English while praising suicide bombers in another. Arafat did this from a position of strength, while the Danes have done it from a position of weakness. Here’s Jyllands-Posten in a Saudi newspaper:

“Allow me in the name of Jyllands-Posten to apologize for what happened and declare my strong condemnation of any step that attacks specific religions, ethnic groups and peoples. I hope that with this I have removed the misunderstanding,” wrote Carsten Juste, the editor of Jyllands-Posten. The full-page advertisements appeared in Asharq al-Awsat, which is printed around the Arab world, as well as the local al-Riyadh and al-Jazira.

And here’s one of their editors in the WaPo:

[W]e cannot apologize for our right to publish material, even offensive material. You cannot edit a newspaper if you are paralyzed by worries about every possible insult. I am offended by things in the paper every day: transcripts of speeches by Osama bin Laden, photos from Abu Ghraib, people insisting that Israel should be erased from the face of the Earth, people saying the Holocaust never happened. But that does not mean that I would refrain from printing them as long as they fell within the limits of the law and of the newspaper’s ethical code.

The Saudi apology trumps the WaPo free speech blather. This battle appears just about over to us, judging by the strong talk to a friendly audience and the weak talk to the Arab world. Care to guess whether anyone will be publishing any more Mohammed cartoons?

And by the way, the cartoon demonstrations and riots are once again proof that terrorism and its threat work pretty darn well in the world. Unfortunately, the cartoon crisis — capitualtion when Western behavior violates sharia law — sets precedents the West may soon come to regret. The very existence of Israel is an affront to Muslims who believe that once-Muslim lands must return to Muslim rule. Given the success of mob pressure, effective mass demonstrations across the EU on this point are not an academic matter.

Finally, we wonder how far into “sensitivity” and “understanding” the MSM will retreat before acknowledging the real problem, that Islam authorizes death sentences for apostasy and blasphemy. Given the success of the extortion in the cartoon caper, we can’t wait to see what reports and editorial policies soon get called offensive to Muslims and blasphemous by big time Imams.

UPDATE

Tigerhawk has related comments on the foolish (suicidal?) asymmetric tolerance of the West.

UPDATE II

In mentioning Arafat, we once again remembered David Samuels’ fascinating In a Ruined Country in the Atlantic, in which an associate of the Old Man said this: “Arafat’s great secret is patience.” Patience is indeed the key to the success of the Islamist project, if it is to succeed. For example, the so-called free press can be co-opted little by little (until it may become, in the words of Mark Steyn, the “Roses of the Prophet Muhammed press”.) The one thing that the Islamists surely would lose is a full-scale hot war with the West. It remains to be seen if Ahmadinejad and his bully boys have the patience required for success, or whether their hot tempers and apocalyptic hunger tempt them into the only kind of conflict they are certain to lose.

UPDATE III

See our subsequent post above.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 9:12 am and is filed under EU, General, MSM, Religion, War, art, culture, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.