Mark Steyn - Lights Out

But it didn’t happen. There was a photograph from one of the early Muslim demonstrations in London that I cut out and kept: a masked protester promising to behead the enemies of Islam, and standing shoulder to shoulder with him two Metropolitan Police officers, dispatched by the state to protect him and enable him to incite the murder of others. When those Muslim men return to that Danish school, I only hope that that little girl is as well protected by the forces of authority.

I realized the other day, talking to a novelist of my acquaintance, that I’d had the conversation before – the one where some writer of repute tells me that he had a great idea for a story involving certain, um, aspects of the, er, geopolitical scene and his publisher (or sometimes even his agent) hemmed and hawed and eventually said well, it sounds like a good idea but in the, ah, current climate maybe we should put that on hold for a year or two, and how about that plot you mentioned a while back about the redneck Baptist serial killer in Alabama? Pitch certain proposals and even the cockiest New York editor at the back of her mind has the vague feeling that her swank Manhattan office could wind up as vulnerable as that Danish grade school. One consequence of the faint-hearted defence of free speech this time round is that more and more publishers and editors will take the path of least resistance next time.

The free world is shuffling into a psychological bondage whose chains are mostly of our own making. “Extreme cases make bad law,” we say. But extreme cases can also make the best defence of principle. In 1847, a man called Don Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew living in Greece, had his house burned in an anti-Semitic riot. He appealed to the Greek government for redress (the sons of some ministers had been involved) and got nowhere. But he chanced to have been born on Gibraltar and thus was, technically, a British subject. And so he turned to Her Majesty’s Government. And, although to most Englishmen’s eyes a century and a half ago no one could have seemed less English than this greasy dago Jew moneylender, Lord Palmerston began a naval blockade of Greece – on the grounds that Don Pacifico was a British subject like any other. And, when the government in Athens backed down, Palmerston addressed the House of Commons thus:

As the Roman in days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum, so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.

Civis Britannicus sum : that was all Don Pacifico had to say.

Today, in the face of more riots and more burnings, Palmerston’s successor Jack Straw, like the foreign ministers of Canada and Europe, is craven and shifty. We in the media could at least recognize our own responsibilities and commercial interests here. The Danish cartoonists are the Don Pacificos of the modern media empire. They’re not Thomas Friedman or Naomi Klein, just some nobodies on the fringes of the map. But the mob has threatened them with death, and if they get away with it they will do it again. For that reason – on Islam, eco-terrorism and anything else – the press should act on the principle that a death threat against one newspaper is a death threat against all and will invite automatic republishing of the offending item. We should all be stout-hearted men – before it’s too late.

FROM EUROPE’s biggest-selling newspaper, The Sun :

Furious Muslims have blasted adult shop [ie, sex shop] Ann Summers for selling a blowup male doll called Mustafa Shag.

Not literally “blasted” in the Danish Embassy sense, or at least not yet. Quite how Britain’s Muslim Association found out about Mustafa Shag in order to be offended by him is not clear. It may be that there was some confusion: given that “blowup males” are one of Islam’s leading exports, perhaps some believers went along expecting to find Ahmed and Walid modeling the new line of Semtex belts. Instead, they were confronted by just another filthy infidel sex gag. The Muslim Association’s complaint, needless to say, is that the sex toy “insults the Prophet Muhammad – who also has the title al-Mustapha.”

In a world in which Danish cartoons insult the prophet and Disney Piglet mugs insult the prophet and Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirl designs insult the prophet, maybe it would just be easier to make a list of things that don’t insult him. Nonetheless, the Muslim Association wrote to the Ann Summers sex-shop chain, “We are asking you to have our Most Revered Prophet’s name ‘Mustafa’ and the afflicted word ‘shag’ removed.”

If I were a Muslim, I’d be “hurt” and “humiliated” that the revered prophet’s name is given not to latex blowup males but to so many real blowup males: The leader of the 9/11 plotters? Mohammed Atta. The British Muslim who self-detonated in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif. The gunman who shot up the El Al counter at LAX? Heshamed Mohamed Hedayet. The former US Army sergeant who masterminded the slaughter at the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed. The murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh? Mohammed Bouyeri. The notorious Sydney gang rapist? Mohammed Skaf. The Washington sniper? John Allen Muhammed. If I were a Muslim, I would be deeply offended that the prophet’s name is the preferred appellation of so many killers and suicide bombers on every corner of the earth.

But apparently that’s not as big a deal as Mustafa Shag. When Samuel Huntington formulated his famous “clash of civilizations” thesis, I’m sure he hoped it would play out as something nobler than shaggers vs nutters. But in a sense that’s the core British value these days. If it’s inherent in Muslim culture to take umbrage at everything, it’s inherent in English culture to turn everything into a lame sex gag. The “Mustafa” template is one of the most revered in the English music-hall tradition: “I’ve been reading the latest scholarly monograph – Sexual Practices Of The Middle East by Mustapha Camel…”

In their determination to appease the surging Muslim demographic in their own country, the British could conceivably withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. But it’s hard to imagine they could withdraw from vulgar sex jokes and still be recognizably British. They are, in the Muslim Association’s choice of word, “afflicted” with shag fever.

In theory, this should have been the perfect moment for Albert Brooks to release his new film Looking For Comedy In The Muslim World . Instead, life is effortlessly outpacing art. Brooks had an excellent premise and, somewhere between studio equivocation and his sense of self-preservation, it all got watered down, beginning with the decision to focus the plot on a trip to India. Which is a, er, mostly Hindu country. But the Arab world refused to let Brooks film there, and, even if they had, he’d have been lucky to get out alive. Needless to say, the movie doesn’t mention that. So a film whose title flaunts a bold disdain for political correctness is, in the end, merely another concession to it.

You can’t blame Brooks, not in a world of surreal headlines like “Cartoon Death Toll Up To Nine” ( The Sunday Times of Australia). Instead of looking for comedy in the Muslim world, the Muslim world’s come looking for comedy in the west and doesn’t like what it’s found. If memory serves, it was NBC who back in the Seventies used to have every sitcom joke about homosexuality vetted by a gay dentist in New Jersey. Apprised of this at a conference on censorship, the producer of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” remarked, “You mean there really is a tooth fairy?” Alas, the Islamist Advisory Commission on Koran-Compatible Humor will be made of sterner stuff, and likely far more devastating to the sitcom biz.