No apologies required

Drawn into a religious conflict - Los Angeles Times

The article above in the LA Times is quite a good one on the cartoons and Islam story.

After some historical background (which I presume is more or less accurate, but I am just taking it on trust), the writer (Tim Rutten) has this to say:

"The West's current struggle with a murderous global Sunni Muslim insurgency and the threat of a nuclear-armed theocracy in Iran makes it clear that it's no longer possible to overlook the culture of intolerance, hatred and xenophobia that permeates the Islamic world. The hard work of rooting those things out will have to be done by honest Muslim leaders and intellectuals willing to retrace their tradition's steps and do the intellectual heavy lifting that participation in the modern world requires. They won't be helped, however, if Western governments continue to pander to Islamic sensitivity while looking away from violent Islamic intolerance. They won't be helped by European diplomats and officials who continue to ignore the officially sanctioned hate regularly directed at Jews by the Mideast's government-controlled media, while commiserating with Muslims offended by a few cartoons in the West's free news media.

The decent respect for the opinions of others that life in modern, pluralistic societies requires is not a form of relativism. It will not do, as Isaiah Berlin once put it, to say, "I believe in kindness and you believe in concentration camps" and let's leave it at that."

The only problem I see is: just how much time does the West have to wait for Islam to be revised by its "honest Muslim leaders and intellectuals?" Not a lot, it would seem.

As you may expect, Christopher Hitchens also thinks the US is sounding too sympathetic to Islam. See his article in Slate here.

In the Wall Street Journal there is also criticism of the West (by and large) caving in too easily on this issue:

"The issue, though, is much larger than the question of how to balance press freedom with religious sensibilities; it goes to the heart of the conflict with radical Islam. The Islamists demand no less than absolute supremacy for their religion--and not only in the Muslim world but wherever Muslims may happen to reside. That's why they see no hypocrisy in their demand for "respect" for Islam while the simple display of a cross or a Star of David in Saudi Arabia is illegal. Infidels simply don't have the same rights."

I am waiting to see what Australian commentators have to say about this. I expect something wishy washy from Fairfax press, and presumably something more in line with the above pieces in News Limited.