Opinion Journal reprints a translation of Bernard-Henri Levy’s call to reason in the current clash of cultures now known as the Muslim Cartoon War. It is well worth spending time reading and passing along to family and friends. An excerpt:

Moral Atomic Bomb
In the midst of a planetary intifada, let us stand by the moderate Muslims.
(…)
So what made this demented scene, this planetary upheaval, possible? However you might look at the problem, it is hard not to see that insidious forces have brought these drawings to the attention of the Muslim masses. And it is hard not to link this provocation, the deliberate circulation of these cartoons, the quasi-home-delivery of a Danish paper that no one could have guessed had so many readers in the Muslim world, it is hard not to link this self-inflicted blasphemy, this calculated offense (calculated, mind you, by the organizers of the distribution of the cartoons), it is hard not to link this blasphemy to a new planetary configuration, itself determined by three recent and major events. (…) [emph mine]

Levy sees a “triangle of death” vs a “triangle of life and reason”. There are over one BILLION Muslims in this world, and even if 1% of them have been radicalized, we can’t possibly fight them all. It is imperative that some form of common ground be found between Western Civilization and Islam, and that means that Islam is going to have to step up and purge itself of its most radical and bloodthirsty elements, denounce, and mean it!, anti-Semitism, assimilate into Western culture if living in the West, acknowledge freedom of speech and freedom of the press, acknowledge the right to practice other religions, and on & on. Can this possibly happen?

The West, for its part, must realize that those Muslims that we see burning and rioting and threatening to harm Danes and other Europeans over these cartoons are a mere sliver of Muslim society, and a rather putrefied one at that. Most don’t realize that they are being played by forces much greater than their local Imams, concerns like Iran and Syria and Hamas, all of which have vested interest in stirring up a world-wide tempest at this very time, to conceal their own political maneuvering (Syria in Lebanon), or to buy time to finish their own weapons of mass destruction (Iran getting the bomb). On his radio show, Hugh Hewitt had this exchange yesterday with Frank Gaffney – transcribed over at Radioblogger:

FG: And we have a guy who is essentially one heartbeat away from having that country become very much the Islamo-facist state with nuclear weapons we fear in Iran. I don’t know. May I come back to you on that, because it’s worth exploring, and it is a very important strategic question.

HH: Yeah. To me, that, if Pakistan ends up with the nukes, with ISI running around who armed the Taliban, right Frank Gaffney?

FG: They did indeed.

HH: This is the fulcrum of the war. Iran might be the second fulcrum, but if we lose Pakistan to the bad guys, we have our nightmare scenario in 24 hours, and things can change like that. (…) [emph mine]

Radical Islam with its hands on the bomb, the true nightmare for our age. The West, especially Europe has finally been given a wake-up call. Hopefully it is not too late, for them. Even if we could protect ourselves by withdrawing from the rest of the world, an isolated Western Hemisphere would be a vastly different place in which to live — more likely in which to try to survive. More and more it seems like Tolkien’s words, as spoken by Galadriel are meant for us, at this very time.

But this I will say to you: your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all.

Oh, the power of a little squiggle of ink on paper. (db)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 10:06 am and is filed under Dhimmitude, Islam, Muslim Cartoon War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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