The longest day

The sun has yet to set on the "international day of anger" proclaimed by Sheikh Yousuf al Qaradawi. The AP reports:

Hundreds of Syrian demonstrators stormed the Danish Embassy in Damascus Saturday and set fire to the building, witnesses said.

The demonstrators were protesting offensive caricatures of Islam's Prophet Mohammed that were first published in a Danish newspaper several months ago.

Witnesses said the demonstrators set fire to the entire building, which also houses the embassies of Chile and Sweden.

Meanwhile in London protests against the Danish cartoons continued for a second day.

From The Telegraph:

Hundreds of Muslims chanted and waved placards outside the Danish embassy to demonstrate against the drawings, which have sparked worldwide anger.

Fences and a row of police prevented the protesters from getting too close to the embassy building.

One speaker told the crowd they were demanding an end to "vilification".

"If you want to debate and criticise then we are ready and we have been waiting, but we are not going to accept these images," he said.

He called on "the governments of the Muslim world to completely sever all contact with European governments" until they had "controlled the media".

By any objective standard, the Danish cartoons can hardly be construed as "vilification." Their critique of Islam is gentle to the point of banality—and certainly can't compete with barbed anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that's an everyday feature of the Arab news media.

What Europeans and Americans who've condemned the cartoons seem to be missing is that they're merely a pretext for Islamists to spread their misguided concept of jihad deeper into the Muslim community—much as Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, was back in 1989. (That alleged affront to Islam is still very much in print today—and its author alive and well—though it no longer elicits much protest from the Muslim clergy.)

Islamists could have equally well seized on a film like this one, which also gives visible form to the Prophet in violation of sharia law.

Or what about all these images of Mohammed? What makes them acceptable and the Danish cartoons such an affront?

The Danish cartoons are merely a convenient tool for the Islamist propaganda masters. If they hadn't existed, Sheik Qaradawi and his followers would no doubt have seized on something else.

The prospect of European governments "controlling the media" under the watchful eye of the imams is what our State Department should be speaking out against, not the lawful expression of opinion within a free and open society.

(Michelle Malkin makes much the same point in her brilliant short film, "First they came …" It's available for download here.)