From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Washington on Friday condemned caricatures in European newspapers of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad, siding with Muslims who are outraged that the publications put press freedom over respect for religion.

“These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims,” State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said in answer to a question. “We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable.”

That’s entirely the wrong emphasis to put on the controversy (though left out of the Reuters report is anything that may have been said to balance this). [Ed: See here for what was left out.] To accuse the publishers of the cartoons of “inciting religious or ethnic hatreds” is out of line. The cartoons are at worst a mild satirical response to decades of terrorist acts committed by people claiming to act in the name of Islam. The Danish newspaper which originally published them was itself making a statement about self-censorship and freedom of speech. How many acts of violence against Muslims have been “incited” by these cartoons? How can such “incitement” be condemned while genuine violence and the ugliest threats of violence are used to try and intimidate the press into submission?

If you ask a mugger to put down his gun, and he shoots you instead, are you guilty of inciting the mugger to shoot you? Should you be charged accordingly? And should he be allowed to sue you?

Such is the logic of the U.S. State Dept. today, apparently.

And noteworthy in its absence today is any acknowledgement of the fact that at least one American print newspaper (the New York Sun) published two of the cartoons yesterday. It is being acknowledged neither by the Gaza gunmen who are threatening Danish, Norwegian and French citizens (but not American), nor by the U.S. State Dept. which prefers to keep this as something that “they did over there,” I suppose. Not to mention the fact that the cartoons are now all over the web.

Unacknowledged also is the fact that if this whole controversy had ended, as it should have, with some letters of outrage written by Danish Muslim leaders to the original newspaper in question, then the great majority of the world would never have seen images like this one:

Addendum: In fairness to the U.S. administration, we do have well over a hundred thousand troops in the field in Iraq, and thousands in Afghanistan, and it would serve no good operational purpose to stir the ire of the natives against the U.S. on this subject of cartoons. That being said, it remains totally off-base to accuse the publishers of the cartoons of “inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner.” A blander and more non-committal formulation on the need to both respect freedom of the press and to be sensitive to people’s religious beliefs would surely have been easy to come up with for the bland egg-heads at ye olde Foggy Bottom.

Addendum II: Hat-tip to reader MW: Hanson is good today.

Now the Islamic world is organizing boycotts of Denmark because one of its newspapers chose to run a cartoon supposedly lampooning the prophet Mohammed. We are supposed to forget that it is de rigueur in raucous Scandinavian popular culture to attack Christianity with impunity. Much less are we to remember that Hamas terrorists occupied and desecrated the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in a globally televised charade.

Instead, Danish officials are threatened, boycotts organized, ambassadors recalled - and, yes, Bill Clinton steps forward to offer another lip-biting apology while garnering lecture fees in the oil-rich Gulf, in the manner of his mea culpa last year to the Iranian mullacracy. There is now a pattern to Clintonian apologies - they almost always occur overseas and on someone else’s subsidy.

Ever since that seminal death sentence handed down to Salman Rushdie by the Iranian theocracy, the Western world has incrementally and insidiously accepted these laws of asymmetry. Perhaps due to what might legitimately be called the lunacy principle (”these people are capable of doing anything at anytime”), the Muslim Middle East can insist on one standard of behavior for itself and quite another for others. It asks nothing of its own people and everything of everyone else’s, while expecting no serious repercussions in the age of political correctness, in which affluent and leisured Westerners are frantic to avoid any disruption in their rather sheltered lives.

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