European Hypocrisy

It is hard not to see the Europeans as hypocritical in their insistence that publishing cartoons about Muhammed is a matter of “free speech”—the same week David Irving is sentenced to three years in prison for having, some years ago, denied the Holocaust was as extensive or as systematic as commonly believed. This even though he has since recanted.

This makes it apparent that free speech is not the issue at all. The issue is what Europeans consider important, and what Muslims consider important. To Europeans, religion is no longer important. Politics is.

As Bob Dylan and many others have pointed out, the Second World War is the modern European creation myth: it is important enough that no European is free to think what he likes on that particular subject.

Why should not the Muslims have the same right to judge certain things beyond the intellectual pale? It is not even as if the Austrian prosecution was an internal matter: the court presumed to impose its moral view and law on a foreigner. Irving is British. So it is quite parallel to Islam making demands of a Danish magazine.

Once again, the party that seems to have the whole thing in the best perspective, to my mind, is the Iranian magazine that is running a contest for cartoons on the subject of the Holocaust.

Tit for tat.