Paris, February 7, 2006 – The passionate riots and attacks on Danish and European embassies and interests that have swept the Islamic world have nothing really to do with the stupid cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published in an unimportant Danish newspaper. You need not be Dr. Freud to understand the phenomenon of displacement.
The huge and bitter reaction comes from the seething resentment in Moslem society, above all in the Middle East, at foreign exploitation and denigration, backwardness, poverty and lack of development. The cartoons were merely the detonator.


Israel’s domination of the Palestinians, the failure of the two Palestinian intafadas, the appearance of al-Qaeda, its dramatic attacks on the United States, the “war against terror” that followed, American invasion and seizure of Afghanistan and Iraq, and current western threats to attack Iran – all this added to the mixture of politico-psychological and religious forces that now has exploded. (Or been caused to explode, since there is clandestine manipulation in this too).
Is this a clash of civilizations? Assuredly yes. Is it a war between civilizations? No. Riots in the streets do not make a war, any more than terrorist attacks in western countries. There is real war in Iraq, and possibly the beginning of resumed war in Afghanistan, but both those are wars between Moslems for control of the Iraqi and Afghan states the Americans will eventually leave, as well as being nationalist warS to force the Americans to leave sooner rather than later.
In the West, one notes the following reactions to what has happened:
First, European counterattack against the double standards of Islamic society: no Christian churches allowed there, official anti-Semitism as well as anti-Zionism, dictatorial suppression of dissident opinion, and more.
Second, indignant western defense of free speech -- as if the liberty of western newspapers were at stake. This might be true in cases where Moslem minorities in Europe attempt to stop papers from publishing material critical of Islam (as do other minorities in comparable situations).
It is posturing when the free speech, costing the speaker or publisher and cartoonist nothing, results in riots and violence in Damascus, Beirut, Teheran, Cairo, Kabul and elsewhere – some of it government exploited, some press-provoked, some spontaneous, all real. (Iran proposes to test European free speech by submitting cartoons ridiculing the Shoah for re-publication in western newspapers.)
Some also express indignation at the stupidity or malice involved in publishing the cartoons in the first place, and the deliberate provocation of repeated publication across Europe. Why make things uselessly worse when people are being killed, societies thrown into murderous demonstrations, and religious hatred stoked? This, in substance, seems to be the criticism made of the cartoons’ publication by the American government.
One cannot ignore the depth of the forces at work on both sides. Essentially the Islamic reaction, in the Arab world above all, derives from the weakness and vulnerability that has invited foreign intervention and domination. Blaming imperialism is an alibi. The Arabs, or Moslems generally, have suffered at foreign hands, but they also bear responsibility for what has happened to them.
It was the Islamic religion itself that officially cut off freedom of theological speculation and development in the later middle ages, after an intellectual flowering which had made the medieval caliphates centers of thought, speculation and literature that surpassed the Europe of the period. If Islam today is a fossil religion, it was Moslems who are responsible, not the West. If Arab society since 1920 has been backward and lived under dictators, Arabs also bear responsibility.
Neighboring Turkey has remained an independent major power throughout the modern period. The Ottoman empire had become Europe’s “weak man” by the start of the 20th century, but the Turks were nonetheless able in 1915 to administer a sanguinary defeat to British, Australian and New Zealand forces at Gallipoli, who were attempting to seize control of navigation between the Mediterranean and Black seas and attack Constantinople. Following the world war, the Turks, under Kemal Ataturk, successfully remade themselves into a modern secular state.
The Arab effort to be free failed. Iraq fought the British, but eventually was forced to join Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt under British or French quasi-colonial rule. After that came Israel and wars, populist dictatorship under Nasser in Egypt, and Ba’ath dictatorships in the Eastern Mediterranean. And now, American intervention to make democrats of them all.
It has all added to the hatred of the West that now has spread, or been propagated, throughout the Islamic Middle East and into Africa and Asia.
Hatred begets hatred, and reinforces learned prejudices and instinctive fear of the other. In Europe and the United States contempt or hatred for Moslems now is palpable. A moral darkness has fallen on both sides of this collision of civilizations.
Copyright 2006 by Tribune Media Services. All Rights Reserved.