I’ve been mon­i­tor­ing the English-​​speaking world’s response to the Mumbai attacks of last week, and in that time I’ve encoun­tered (out of dozens) one edi­to­r­ial car­toon and one col­umn that actu­ally cut to the heart of the matter.

If you go to Daryl Cagle’s archive of polit­i­cal toons, you’ll find a sub­sec­tion on the Mumbai attacks. Some of the images are clearly angry; some are reflec­tive; some are mourn­ful — but only one actu­ally seems to get to the point, and it wasn’t even included in the Mumbai sub­sec­tion. For the most part, you sense the out­rage; but there’s almost a sub­tle squea­mish­ness (to my mind) about the source of the out­rage. It’s almost as though the car­toon­ists don’t want to directly state what the root of the Mumbai atroc­ity was.

Similarly, com­men­tary has arisen from mul­ti­tudi­nous key­boards but I find myself in agree­ment only with one col­umn, and it’s writ­ten by Thomas Friedman, of all people.

In a recent piece he begins by point­ing out how furi­ous the reac­tion was in, ahem, Certain Quarters to the pub­li­ca­tion of a Danish cartoonist’s mock­ery of Mohammed in 2006, and has this to offer:

[W]hile the Pakistani government’s sober response [to the Mumbai killings] is impor­tant, and the sin­cere expres­sions of out­rage by indi­vid­ual Pakistanis are crit­i­cal, I am still hop­ing for more. I am still hop­ing — just once — for that mass demon­stra­tion of “ordi­nary peo­ple” against the Mumbai bombers, not for my sake, not for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake.

This is point­ing to the crux, the heart of the issue that no one really wants to face. Those ten mur­der­ous psy­chopaths in India were not work­ing with a “pre­vi­ously unknown” group, whether or not they were “state­less” (as Pakistani author­i­ties said ini­tially). Friedman does not explic­itly delin­eate here who these “ordi­nary peo­ple” are, but he goes on to say:

We know from the Danish car­toons affair that Pakistanis and other Muslims know how to mobi­lize quickly to express their heart­felt feel­ings, not just as indi­vid­u­als, but as a pow­er­ful col­lec­tive. That is what is needed here.

And there it is, a bit more starkly. While some of the toons on Cagle’s site seem to indict Pakistan, and many oth­ers bewail generic ter­ror­ism, vir­tu­ally no one seems to want to point to the actual problem.


Muslim fun­da­men­tal­ism today is as vir­u­lent as Christian fun­da­men­tal­ism was in the 1500s, and is every bit as dan­ger­ous — and the fact is that the Mumbai assailants were Pakistani only by cit­i­zen­ship and ter­ror­ists only by semantics.

Before all of that, first and fore­most, they were Muslim.

Before you go imag­in­ing I’m try­ing to be a bigot here, I’ll con­cede that prior to 2001, ter­ror­ist attacks in the US were almost exclu­sively per­pe­trated by our own cit­i­zens — Christians, one should note. But I am not being unrea­son­able in point­ing out that there is a clear pre­dis­po­si­tion in cer­tain Muslim fac­tions toward vio­lent demon­stra­tions of protest over inane car­i­ca­tures; and that the acts of destruc­tion which have been per­pe­trated in New York, Madrid, London and now Mumbai have, to a fault, all been per­pe­trated by Muslims who are act­ing from within their specifically-​​twisted belief systems.

That is sim­ply not a coin­ci­dence. These per­sons’ Muslim beliefs have been cor­rupted, to be cer­tain, by “mul­lahs” who deserve noth­ing more than bul­lets in their skulls — but, as Friedman asks, where is the right­eous out­rage from other Muslims? When hun­dreds are will­ing to take to the streets in foam­ing, scream­ing protest over a car­toon, why are there not thou­sands — mil­lions — doing the same to protest the mur­der of nearly two hun­dred human beings in an act of indis­crim­i­nate slaughter?

In his col­umn Friedman men­tions a com­ment from a Muslim friend of his regard­ing the Catholic church and its endemic pop­u­la­tion of rapist-​​priests; inter­est­ingly, I was think­ing some­thing sim­i­lar a day or so before I read his piece. To my mind, any Catholic who refuses to protest, weekly, against the rape of boys by clergy is com­plicit in con­tin­u­ing abuse. The same is so, I believe, of every Muslim who does not protest, vehe­mently, the actions of their extrem­ist fringes. This silence is a tacit endorsement.

The car­toon I men­tioned, by Don Wright, is below. It’s an effec­tive and valid expres­sion of every­thing I brought up here.

Wright nails it. He accu­rately labels the ter­ror­ists as being Islamic, and he accu­rately declares what they wor­ship, what they hold holy — not their alleged god, but the power of the gun.

I know the US is far from per­fect. I detest, as both an American and a human being, the atroc­ity our nation per­pe­trated in Iraq, a sov­er­eign coun­try which had done noth­ing to our land or our peo­ple, and which posed no threat to us what­so­ever. I loathe the idea of pax amer­i­cana, of spread­ing “democ­racy” at gun­point. I have main­tained, for years now, that the best course we could have taken would have been to sim­ply stay in Afghanistan, sta­bi­lize that nation, erad­i­cate the Taliban from its pop­u­la­tion, and help it rebuild and trans­form itself into a model democ­racy. Alas, we had an ass­hole for a VP, an idiot for a CinC, and a Sec’y of Defense for whom war was bet­ter than Viagra.

Our national upfuck­ery, how­ever, does not inval­i­date the very real fact that — as the Q’ran says* — forc­ing Islam onto oth­ers is not the way to spread the faith. And until the mod­er­ate Muslim world rises up uni­ver­sally against this reli­gious psy­chopa­thy, it will con­tinue until some lunatic fringe shit­brain some­where gets his hands on a seri­ously badass weapon.

Muslims, the threat is com­ing from within your ranks. It is up to you to do some­thing about it. If you con­tinue not to act, you have no right to protest when you are greeted with hos­til­ity and mis­trust by those of us who are not bomb-​​wielding religiously-​​deranged fools; and if you think the back­lash now is bad, just wait until some Allahtard pops a CBRN in a major city some­place, and Muslims every­where sud­denly find them­selves rounded up and deported en masse to Saudi Arabia — or incar­cer­ated in “peace camps.”

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* “The Cattle,” 6.125:

Therefore (for) whom­so­ever Allah intends that He would guide him aright, He expands his breast for Islam, and (for) whom­so­ever He intends that He should cause him to err, He makes his breast strait and nar­row as though he were ascend­ing upwards; thus does Allah lay unclean­ness on those who do not believe.

This is one exam­ple of sev­eral that state clearly it’s up to Allah to deter­mine who believes and who does not.

This also essen­tially trans­forms Islamic ter­ror­ists into blas­phe­mers, arro­gat­ing upon them­selves the power of God. Yet there are no fat­wahs declared against them. Why?