Sensitivity And Apocalypse

From IBD:

Posted 2/6/2006
Diplomacy: As the worldwide cartoon war ended its first violent week, the State Department sought to put out the fire. The peacekeeping impulse was understandable, but just what principles did its statement uphold?
Foggy Bottom's reaction to the turmoil, in which Islamists across the globe torched European offices and called for the beheading of any Westerner who so much as drew an image of Muhammad, was painfully tepid. Suddenly, the clash of civilizations had become unmanageable by normal diplomatic means.

So, just what do you do across the polished tabletop when the earth itself opens wide and out fly all the ancient demons?

Here's the statement that poor Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman read: "Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief."
This was pure, unsophisticated universalism meant as balm.

Granted, something reassuring needed to be sent to our anti-terrorism allies — Afghanistan's Karzai and Pakistan's Musharaff, to name two — whose very survival was put at risk by Islamic demonstrators protesting cartoons that satirized Muhammad.

But did McCormack's statement send the right signals? For that matter, did Western commentators who echoed McCormack?

Answers: No, and no. For starters, it's out of place for the U.S. government to define acceptable journalistic content in our own country, let alone in another. The better signal would have been to defend, in no uncertain terms, the freedom of the press, especially now that several European journalists have gone into hiding.

Does any U.S. second-guesser, however committed to the intelligent prosecution of the war on terrorism, really think the conflict would have held off if only cartoonists had shown "sensitivity"?

Clearly, absent these cartoons, something else would have sparked the rage. The clarifying moment has arrived, sooner not later, catching the State Department and the most well-intentioned commentators unawares.

Indeed, we detect a "blame-the-West-first" reflex in all this. Few of our fussier commentators seem to have considered the likely hand of Tehran in this past week's rage. The fanatical regime, ubiquitous throughout the Islamo-fascist world, may well have helped stage the violent demonstrations.

The chilling news, reported in The Washington Times by Arnaud de Borchgrave, is that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "is close to the messianic Hojjatieh Society," which anticipates an apocalypse within two years. Ahmadinejad's circle actually believes it can produce the "chaos on Earth" that will hasten paradise.
Somehow, sending cartoonists to sensitivity training doesn't seem to matter any more.