Condescension is also required. The demonstrator who waves a sword calling for a beheading is often excused. The poor guy must not be educated, rather than just cruel and dangerous. “We’re so sorry for the little mix-up” is the public Western answer to the shout of “Death to you!”
We also know why all this won’t stop, whether in Pakistan or Sudan — or whether over a cartoon or a teddy bear or who knows what next.
A globalized world means communications are instantaneous. What one person in Denmark draws is broadcast immediately to millions in Islamabad and Khartoum. And they are apparently glued to, but very angry at, the modern world that pops up on their television screens.
The Muslim Middle East has much of the world’s oil. So its excesses are put up with by the rest of the world rather than loudly condemned. But after 9/11 and the bombings in Madrid and London, Islamists screaming for a beheading cannot quite be laughed off. Instead they may be the vanguard of something far worse.
Decades of multiculturalism have brainwashed Europeans and Westerners into believing that Islamic furor must be judged in a special cultural context, or is only understood through some real past grievance, usually dating back to the Crusades.
Sometimes apologists dredge up Timothy McVeigh or violence in Northern Ireland as if to prove that supposed Christian-inspired terrorism is just as much a world danger as jihadism. We know it isn’t, but such moral equivalence sounds liberal and might calm down the mob.
Other times we drag Iraq into the conversation and say the armed removal of Saddam radicalized Muslims — as if the fatwa against Salman Rushdie or 9/11 followed the outbreak of that war.
What would stop this unhealthy teddy bear syndrome?
— Weaning ourselves off imported oil and therefore the need to appease those who have it.
— Politely informing Muslims that Westerners believe the norms of free speech and expression are to be uniformly applied. No one religion or region gets a special pass.
— Supporting human rights abroad and offering some constitutional alternative in the Middle East to theocracy and dictatorship that both encourage Islamic radicalism.
— And remaining militarily strong.
Remember that the fanatic waving his age-old sword in the Khartoum street over a teddy bear shows the same dangerous derangement as the nut in Tehran who may one day want his hand on the Bomb.