Death by Sensitivity

From Mark Steyn's February 5th piece on the double standard on religious sensitivity.

Thus, NBC is celebrating Easter this year with a special edition of the gay sitcom "Will & Grace," in which a Christian conservative cooking-show host, played by the popular singing slattern Britney Spears, offers seasonal recipes -- "Cruci-fixin's." On the other hand, the same network, in its coverage of the global riots over the Danish cartoons, has declined to show any of the offending artwork out of "respect" for the Muslim faith.

Which means out of respect for their ability to locate the executive vice president's home in the suburbs and firebomb his garage.

Jyllands-Posten wasn't being offensive for the sake of it. They had a serious point -- or, at any rate, a more serious one than Britney Spears or Terence McNally. The cartoons accompanied a piece about the dangers of "self-censorship" -- i.e., a climate in which there's no explicit law forbidding you from addressing the more, er, lively aspects of Islam but nonetheless everyone feels it's better not to.

That's the question the Danish newspaper was testing: the weakness of free societies in the face of intimidation by militant Islam.

One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they'll marvel at how easy it all was. You don't need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that's a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural "sensitivity," the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want -- including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, hailed the "sensitivity" of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending cartoons.

Go read it.

Ya know, magnanimity and tolerance for "the other" is a admirable thing. But, only if that sentiment is shared by the aforementioned "other". That door definitely swings both ways.

If Europe - and the pussy executives at NBC for that matter - do not begin to grow an f'ing spine, it does not bode well at all. We're like the proverbial frog in a I'm not saying that Western Civ. is going to fall - at least not at the hands of conquerors. No, my greatest fear is that, if we do not deal with this here and now, the butcher's bill will be much, much larger. And make no mistake, the casualties will be overwhelmingly Muslims.

The cultural consequences of inflicting this level of destruction, even in self defense... It will be decidedly unpleasant.