by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
FrontPage Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n The riots and violence in Afghanistan over some accidentally burned Korans are following a script that by now is all too drearily familiar. As we have seen over the years with the riots over the Mohammed cartoons, Pope Benedict\u2019s comments about violence in Islam, or false rumors of Korans flushed down toilets, violent Muslim overreactions to slights are immediately followed by anxious apologies from American leaders. Rather than defusing the anger, however, such groveling merely encourages more contempt and violence.<\/p>\n So too with the current riots, which have killed 30 people, including 4 US soldiers, two of them in the high-security Interior Ministry. Another seven Sunday were wounded in a grenade attack by demonstrators. This violence, moreover, has been encouraged by mullahs in mosques, teachers in madrassas, and members of parliament. Predictably, the Taliban \u2014 with whom our government is eager to talk peace \u2014 has encouraged people to \u201cturn their guns on the foreign infidel invaders.\u201d President Obama has responded to this incitement and violence by offering his personal \u201csincere apologies,\u201d professing his \u201cdeep regret,\u201d and vowing to hold those responsible accountable. Defense Secretary Panetta and NATO commander John Allen also apologized.<\/p>\n But no reciprocal apology has been demanded from President Hamid Karzai for the incitement to violence on the part of government and religious leaders, or for the deaths of two of our troops at the hands of an Afghan soldier we trained and armed, and another two inside a government ministry. Newt Gingrich had the best response to this sorry spectacle: \u201cThere seems to be nothing that radical Islamists can do to get Barack Obama\u2019s attention in a negative way and he is consistently apologizing to people who do not deserve the apology of the President of the United States period,\u201d Gingrich said in Washington D.C. \u201cIt is Hamid Karzai who owes the American people an apology, not the other way around. This destructive double standard whereby the United States and its democratic allies refuse to hold accountable leaders who tolerate systematic violence and oppression in their borders must come to an end.\u201d<\/p>\n The administration and the military, of course, rationalize their indulgence of this double standard as motivated by \u201cthe safety of American men and women in Afghanistan, of our military and civilian personnel there,\u201d as Obama spokesman Jay Carney put it. But as one demonstrator in Kabul said, \u201cWe don\u2019t care about Obama\u2019s apology. We have to protest to be responsible to our god. They are burning our Koran. An apology is not enough.\u201d Most Afghans obviously agree, since rioting and killing have intensified despite apologies from our highest government and military officials. Indeed, over the past few decades, no amount of apologies for alleged \u201cinsults\u201d to Muslims has stopped Islamists from attacking us. Nor have the good deeds benefitting Muslims, from rescuing Bosnians from genocide to liberating Libyans from Gaddafi, stopped jihadists from wanting to kill Americans for an endless list of reasons. The past decades of such incidents have shown instead that apologies are useless, and merely confirm the impression among Muslims that we are spiritually inferior, and so endorse the perverse logic that accidentally burning a book is worse than murdering our soldiers and citizens. Why else would we publicly flagellate ourselves over such \u201cinsults\u201d even as we say nothing about the Muslim murders of Christians in Egypt and Nigeria, or the Muslim laws prescribing capital punishment for converts to Christianity, or the Muslim vandalizing and destruction of 300 churches in Cyprus, or the Muslim slow-motion extermination of Christians in lands that worshipped Christ for 6 centuries before Islam even existed?<\/p>\n As Gingrich pointed out, these double standards are counterproductive and have been proven over and over to make Muslims despise us rather than like us. What we refuse to accept is the intolerant chauvinism inherent in Islam, the belief that Muslims are the \u201cbest of nations\u201d and destined to rule the world. Accepting the double standard merely confirms their superiority and our inferiority. After all, to let someone behave according to one set of principles or standards while demanding that you be subjected to others is to validate a claim of superiority that justifies the disproportionate and unjust behavior. It\u2019s acting like a battered wife, who accepts a beat-down from her husband as justified punishment for burning his dinner. This double standard also reflects incoherent thinking, a failure to apply consistently a principle that presumably has universal validity. Hence we celebrate and practice \u201ctolerance\u201d at the same time we enable, ignore, excuse, and rationalize intolerance. In the West\u2019s struggle with Islamic jihad, our doubts about the superiority of Western beliefs have coupled with this breakdown in ethical reasoning. The result is the appeasement of jihadist aggression and the confirmation of the jihadist estimation of the West\u2019s weakness and corruption.<\/p>\n This record of appeasement, then, has encouraged many Muslims to demand from Westerners a hypersensitivity to Islam, all the while that Christians and Jews in Muslim countries are subjected to harassment, assault, vicious insult, and murder. In the West, respect for Muslim holy books and practices is supposed to be granted as a self-evident right beyond argument or debate. Yet Western ideals and principles, such as tolerance for different creeds, are derided, disrespected, and rejected as self-evident evils. Worse yet, we pretend that our appeasement of jihadist violence is an expression of tolerance, the liberal-democratic virtue that simply has little meaning in Islamic theology. Why would any pious Muslim \u201ctolerate\u201d an infidel culture that jeopardizes the eternal souls of Muslims, and that stands in the way of others\u2019 converting to Islam? As the Ayatollah Khomeini said, \u201cThose who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation.\u201d Such confidence is reinforced when we acquiesce in a standard whereby burning a Koran or insulting Mohammed with a cartoon is worse than killing people.<\/p>\n We know why many of our leaders accept this double standard. They have bought into John Lennon\u2019s juvenile utopia in which there is \u201cnothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.\u201d Shorn of their transcendent, non-negotiable foundations, all our beliefs are now contingent and negotiable, easily traded away for security or comfort. At the same time, multiculturalism bestows on the non-Western \u201cother\u201d a finely calibrated sensitivity to his culture and religion, no matter how dysfunctional or oppressive, all the while the West refuses to extend such consideration to its own. Why would it? Haven\u2019t generations of Western intellectuals and artists told the world how corrupt and evil the West is? Haven\u2019t they asserted, as Pascal Bruckner put it, that \u201cevery Westerner is presumed guilty until proven innocent\u201d?<\/p>\n Having culturally internalized this self-loathing and lack of conviction, we are vulnerable to those who are filled with passionate intensity about the rightness of their beliefs and the payback due to us for our alleged historical sins such as colonialism or imperialism or globalization. And then we wonder why the jihadist considers us ripe for conquest, and destined to be subjected to the superior values of Islam.<\/p>\n \u00a92012 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The riots and violence in Afghanistan over some accidentally burned Korans are following a script that by now is all too drearily familiar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[29,225,22],"tags":[319,12,192,234,1028,231,1061,431,30,1047,197,1016,58],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-f6","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1226,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/jihadists-get-the-veto\/","url_meta":{"origin":936,"position":0},"title":"Jihadists Get the Veto","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 2, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity\u00a0\u2013 Yeats, The Second Coming Florida pastor Terry Jones called off his Koran-burning after President Obama and others in his administration joined the chorus of Americans asking him not to go through with\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3362,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/running-scared-of-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":936,"position":1},"title":"Running Scared of Islam","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 5, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society One of Broadway\u2019s big hits this season is the musical\u00a0The Book of Mormon, a creation of the scatological geniuses behind the cartoon\u00a0South Park. As one would expect, the show is \u201cblasphemous, scurrilous and more foul-mouthed than David Mamet on a blue streak,\u201d\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5245,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/muslims-have-desecrated-bibles-and-churches\/","url_meta":{"origin":936,"position":2},"title":"Muslims Have Desecrated Bibles and Churches","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 29, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"So what is all the mob angst over the Koran? by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The images of Muslims rampaging over rumors and unproven allegations of \u201cKoran abuse\u201d are troubling \u2014 but not because of the behavior of the mobs. What else should we expect from fanatics whose religion\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7787,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/nothing-to-do-with-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":936,"position":3},"title":"Nothing to Do With Islam","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 20, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine The war against jihadism has been chronically misunderstood because of our failure to acknowledge the religious motives of Muslim jihadists. This failure began in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Trapped in our Western secularist paradigms, we interpreted the uprising against the Shah as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/QuranRifle3.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3135,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bin-laden-is-dead-but-our-delusions-live-on\/","url_meta":{"origin":936,"position":4},"title":"Bin Laden Is Dead, But Our Delusions Live On","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 3, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society The death of Osama bin Laden has some symbolic value, particularly for the United States. A great power exercises influence not just through its military and economic assets, but through its prestige. A power that can be relied upon to punish its\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3357,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/memo-to-the-general-free-speech-doesnt-kill-people-jihadists-kill-people\/","url_meta":{"origin":936,"position":5},"title":"Memo to the General: Free Speech Doesn’t Kill People, Jihadists Kill People","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 10, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society Citizen control of the military is one of the most important foundations of political freedom. Rather than an instrument of a powerful autocrat or king, the army in a republic serves the collective interests, security, and policies of the state as determined\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=936"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5734,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936\/revisions\/5734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}