The leftist response to the latest furor in the Muslim world is in danger of being drowned out by crickets. Unfortunately the story has become too large to ignore, so Atrios explains:

I’m not too sympathetic with the notion that anything under the cover of religion is automatically entitled to deference. On the other hand, “don’t be an asshole” about peoples’ religious beliefs when they aren’t trying to impose them on you seems to be reasonably good etiquette. The cartoons weren’t funny and the visual portrayal of Mohammed was done just to “be an asshole” without any larger point to it. It’s like parading around in blackface just for the hell of it. There’s no point other than “I’m doing this to see who I can piss off.” I certainly defend the right to piss people off, though not always the decision to do so.

Strange, isn’t it, that a habitually potty-mouthed leftist should be so concerned with etiquette.

The larger point of the cartoons, for Atrios and anyone else too technologically challenged to use a search engine, can be found at Newspaperindex.com:

Jyllands-Posten called for and printed the cartoons by various Danish illustrators, after reports that artists were refusing to illustrate works about Islam, out of fear of fundamendalist retribution. The newspaper said it printed the cartoons as a test of whether Muslim fundamentalists had begun affecting the freedom of expression in Denmark.

So the response to this test demonstrates that there are indeed some assholes out there trying to impose their religious beliefs. And no, unfortunately for the left, it has nothing to do with Chimpy W. McHalliburton and the Far Right Wing’s attempts to pack the Supreme Court with “extremists”. Which goes a long way toward explaining the left’s lack of interest.

Most of the rest of the pro-anti crowd has nothing less inconsistent to say than Artrios, they’re just smart enough not to blurt it out.

Not that that would be Kos’ excuse. After a weekend of headlines about the violence the tag “muslim cartoons” at the left’s most popular site rates exactly one story. Kos himself hasn’t said anything about the cartoons yet, and if he never does we can safely assume it’s because “it’s pretty obvious — we don’t love terrorists”. Republicans “hate the terrorists because they’re Muslim” but at the same time love the American Taliban with whom they have so much in common.

This is the kind of ill-informed and self-contradictory piffle that passes for logic in the fever swamps of the traitorous left.

Via Powerline:

All Jihad All the Time
What Andrew Bostom’s “The Legacy of Jihad” tells us about the history of Islam.
by Dean Barnett

IN THE WAKE OF THE 9/11 ATTACKS, President Bush famously referred to Islam as a “religion of peace.” To display solidarity with this notion, politicians of all rank in both America and Europe hurriedly made their way to the nearest mosque to show that, in spite of the destruction of the World Trade Center, they bore no animus to Islam.

Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island based physician, had a different reaction. Until September 11 Bostom had been completely absorbed in his medical career. Afterwards, he began a singular effort to learn as much about Islam as possible.

The results of Bostom’s study have recently been published in book form. The Legacy of Jihad, for which Bostom is both editor and a contributing writer, studies jihad from the 7th century to the present day. It is a thorough work; hardly an act of offensive jihad in the last 1,300 years has escaped Bostom’s scholarship.

It’s a disquieting read. Counter to President Bush’s simplistic characterization of Islam as a religion of peace, the truth is far more nuanced; parts of the Koran call for peace, other verses have a decidedly different tenor.

Bostom’s experience is one that some of us can relate to. Without knowing the man I can already guess he has been labelled a vile bigot racist Islamophobe. What fascinates me is that even after 9/11 and in spite of the ongoing Islam-related violence around the world I still run into so many people who remain oddly incurious about the source of all the animus. Of course many people think it’s quite clear: in the past the US shamelessly exploited the Third World and propped up horrible dictators there, and today we torture Muslims and piss on their Koran while we wage an arrogant unilateral imperialistic neocon war of whim. So convenient it is for these “patriots” to project their own anti-military, anti-corporate, anti-Bush motives on the enemy that they completely misunderstand what really motivates the Jihadis.

I admit it’s not easy. First you have to overcome the politically correct Western education that has taught you that all religions are equal. Equally bad. “Religion, don’t you know, is something that generally only stupid people fall for. It generally causes violence. Especially Chrisitanity. Look at the Crusades, the Inquisition. QED.” Then you have the contemporary Western apologists for Islam, including many politicians and Middle Eastern studies professors, who from their positions of authority and expertise lecture on the loving tolerance of Islam. “There shall be no compulsion in religion.” Yet we see, time and again, people shouting “Allahu Ahkbar!” as they blow themselves up or hack some defenseless hostage’s head off. Those of us who note that the common thread is Islam are heckled for our ignorance. “You must not have read the Koran. Or you read it wrong. How many Muslims do you know?” Well. It turns out I don’t know any Nazis, and I haven’t read Mein Kampf, but I’m pretty sure Nazism was a bad idea.

Not all people have the capacity to question their deeply ingrained (dare I say brainwashed) principles of moral equivalence, or to withstand the slurs and intimidation of the intellectual elite. The easiest way to find that strength is to bypass these psychological obstacles and investigate Islam and Jihad for yourself. You still trust your own judgement don’t you? Well go ahead and read the feel good pap intended for infidels. Maybe you’ve already read some. Well don’t stop there. Read books like “The Legacy of Jihad”. Read what Muslims say to other Muslims when they think infidels aren’t listening. Dig deep enough and you’ll find that Jihadi hatred of the West is based on its infidelness. Jihadis resent the West’s involvement with their countries and their leaders because it pulls them away from true Islam. “Let not believers take infidels for their friends rather than believers.” Infidels don’t have to occupy their Holy Land – they never have. Turns out it’s enough just to do business, to put the words and pictures and ideas of the disgustingly corrupt and degenerate infidel culture in front of Muslims. That is our crime.

Muslims believe that the Koran is the literal word of Allah, and it is blasphemy to question its infallibility. Which is strange because it often seems to contradict itself. Apologists like to quote the warm fuzzy side of any contradiction. They don’t want infidels to know (or don’t know themselves) that Islamic scholars have long used the idea of abrogation to resolve the contradictions. Unfortunately for infidels, the contradictions are usually resolved in favor of the message Mohammed gave in his later, less warm and fuzzy days.

The goal of the Jihadis is to crush the infidel, not to tolerate him. They don’t make any secret of this, though they don’t particularly care enough to write letters to the editor of the New York Times thanking them for keeping a leash on the NSA and CIA. The Jihadis are totally preoccupied with unbelievers, polytheists, and apostates. It is completely about religion for them, and not in the way of peace and love that most non-Muslims may assume. Jihadis are not like the ordinary “militants”, “insurgents”, or “guerillas” the press has conditioned us to associate with secular struggles for power. They are mujahideen, or holy warriors. They fight for a way of life, not a mere religion. They seek to gain power where they do not already hold it, and to wipe away all that is not Islam where they do hold power.

The difference between Islamist moderates and extremists is patience. Even ignolamists (to coin a phrase) know that anything perceived to go against Islam is to be feared and avoided because it will “create extremists”. That’s a major boo boo. “We’d better not try to keep them from getting nukes. Why? Because they might nuke us. If we just bide our time the moderates will eventually moderate. Or something.” When you know what actually motivates the Jihadis you aren’t afraid to piss them off or make more of them. You realize that their idealogy is already out there metastasizing. The only sane thing civilization can do is confront it.

For Clooney fans this may all seem too complicated. “Isn’t it George Bush and the corporations who are evil?” OK. If you investigate Islam and you still want to delude yourself that corporate greed and presidential overreach are a bigger threat, then by all means go ahead. It’s a free country, at least as long as you and brave patriots like you can fight off Bush’s police state. Of course if you didn’t have such opinions, or have come to change them since, then you may now understand the sense of betrayal and dismay I feel at the false guilt of the useful infidels who bin Laden counts on to undermine their own way of life.

The author of the Bostom book review, Dean Barnett, also writes at SOXBLOG. His wit, insight, range of topics, and output far exceed mine. Scanning back I found this apt observation:

If they read the papers and watch the newscasts, our Jihadist foes will doubtlessly get the wrong opinion of the American people. They will wrongly conclude that the American people are obsessed with the niceties of wire-tapping and torture, completely unaware that the overwhelming majority of Americans is entirely indifferent to the rights of suspected and/or actual terrorists.

There should be no mistake about the following – if there is another attack on American soil, especially one involving WMD, the demand from the American public will be for blood and lots of it. But do our enemies know this? Are they deceiving themselves into thinking that America will react like the Daily Kos, John Kerry and the New York Times almost unquestionably will – blame Bush first, respond later?

That is the real disservice such entities are doing America. It’s not that they are traitorously providing aid and comfort to the enemy. It’s that they are giving the enemy false hope.

And the results of that may be tragic.

It’s the Demography, Stupid
BY MARK STEYN
Wednesday, January 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries.

Speaking of which, if we are at war–and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe don’t accept that proposition–then what exactly is the war about?

We know it’s not really a “war on terror.” Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even “radical Islam.” The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it’s easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in “Palestine,” Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it’s not what this thing’s about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It’s not the HIV that kills you, it’s the pneumonia you get when your body’s too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose–as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

An unusally long piece from Steyn which, true to his style, is marred only by his occasional flippancy when discussing a deadly serious subject.

The short story: THEY are outreproducing US. If you think splitting the world into US and THEM is simplistic you obviously have no idea what THEY have in store for YOU. Wake up already.

You might also be interested in Steyn’s discussion of the article with Hugh Hewitt.