Violent Muslim reaction to the cartoons is just one more excuse that radical Islam is using to spread its hatred of our western culture and values. To say that we have to consider the ‘delicate sensibilities of savages’ in order to purchase peace from them is the kind of appeasement that history has proved to be disastrous time and again.
I have in my mind a picture of Neville Chamberlin (the British Prime Minister in 1938) coming back from his meeting in Munich with Adolf Hitler. He stepped off the plane in England and held up a document, jointly signed by Hitler and himself and, smiling to the press, joyfully announced “Peace in our time”! And all the ‘peaceniks’ in England pointed their fingers at Winston Churchill and said—“see, we told you so!” But Hitler had already planned his invasion of Poland and soon enough, on schedule, did just that.
You will never be able to purchase peace by appeasing savages and capitulating to their irrational demands and death threats. This has been proved over and over.
The cartoons themselves are not the point. The point is that each person in the West has to face what we are really up against and decide where we stand. Do we side with ‘reason’ and the application of a rational view of the world to determine how individual men and women live their lives, or do we side with the interpretation of ‘holy scriptures’ by ‘men of god’ to enforce a particular way of life upon us
What inevitably separates the Western culture from Islam is the recognition, by the West, that reason is the means by which we pursue knowledge. That man’s rational faculty is the means by which we discover what is true and what is false—and the means by which we wish to establish proper relations between individual citizens. Islam, on the other hand, is based upon the premise and commitment to mystic dogma and the rule of a theocratic elite of powerful mullah’s.
At the root of our secular culture is the concept of individual rights. These rights are founded upon rational principles—and are the very thing despised by most Islamic clerics and their followers. The root principle of individual rights is the inalienable right to speak ones mind, according to the dictates of ones own conscience, free from the fear of being murdered by irrational savages who disagree and/or because their ‘feelings’ have been ‘hurt’!
We must cease our appeasement of Islamic tyrants and our growing capitulation to their increasing demands. If they do not like our open and free society, then they are quite at liberty to leave at any time and seek to build their dream of an Islamic State under Sharia elsewhere.
In addition, we in the West must cease supporting irrational Islam with financial handouts. We must cease allowing the transfer of Western technology and we must refuse to put food on the table of our enemies by purchasing their manufactured goods.
We are clearly at war with an irrational and brutally savage enemy. We must face this obvious fact and behave accordingly. We did not purchase items made in Germany or Japan during the Second World War—and for the same obvious reasons!