Put down the gun and then we'll talk

The cartoon protests continue today with an attack on a Norwegian military base in Afghanistan.

In related developments, ABC News reports:

A 14-year-old boy has reportedly been killed in clashes with police in Somalia. In Iran, protesters hurled rocks and firebombs at the Danish embassy as a newspaper launched a competition to test Western protection of free speech by asking readers to submit cartoons about the Holocaust.

An Italian Catholic priest was shot and killed in Turkey  Sunday—allegedly, it turns out, because his 16-year-old Muslim assailant believed him somehow responsible for the Danish cartoons. (Michelle Malkin has more.)

Meanwhile, the editors of The New York Times have finally weighed in on the crisis with an editorial that seems mainly designed to defend the paper's refusal to publish the "offensive" cartoons and to make sure its executives don't end up with bullseyes painted on their backs. (To their credit, the Times' editors did point out that the imams who have been urging their fellow Muslims to express their outrage at the Jyllands-Posten cartoons slipped some particularly offensive counterfeit cartoons into the mix.)

One telling feature of the Times' editorial was its characterization of the original Jyllands-Posten experiment in journalistic self-censorship as "juvenile." The question of whether our news media have the same courage to criticize a religion whose most extreme adherents are demonstrably capable of performing unspeakable violence against "unbelievers" as they do to criticize, say, Christianity or Judaism strikes me as one of the important the West will face in the coming decade.

As The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's redoubtable Jack Kelly explains:

Most of Europe's political leaders would like to respond with more appeasement. But ordinary Europeans wonder why they must accommodate the demands of bullying immigrants who have swollen their crime rates and welfare rolls.

Muslims deserve to have their faith respected, wrote Tony Parsons in the left wing British newspaper the Mirror.

"But when someone starts carrying placards in my city gloating about 9/11 and 7/7, when men with big mouths start promising death and destruction, when you tell us that we will be massacred if we offend you, then our tolerance is pushed to the breaking point," he said.

There's something inherently wrong about demanding "tolerance" and "respect" when you're making those demands at gunpoint.

Political power, Mao Zedong once famously said, grows out of the barrel of a gun. Although that point of view may be anathema to most citizens of Western democracies, it's one many followers of Islam—most visibly in Iran and Syria and among their terrorist allies—have lately come to embrace.

When a news organization like CNN alters its reporting in a Muslim country to appease that nation's despotic leadership, it's a tragic blow to a four-centuries-old tradition of press freedom. But it's infinitely more tragic when Western news organizations are similarly intimidated on their home turf.

That The New York Times finds it "juvenile" to test the freedom of a European press that's quite literally staring down the barrel of a gun is perhaps the best evidence yet of how jaded we've become.

If Muslims want to have a discussion about tolerance, fine.

But first they need to convince their jihadist brethren to put down the gun.