Glorious Multiculturalism

"Islam cannot be separated from the state because it guides us through every detail of running the state and our lives.
"... For Muslims, the word 'religion' does not refer only to a collection of beliefs and rituals, it refers to a way of life which includes all values, behaviours, and details of living."
Islamic scholar Jaafar Sheikh Idris

Believers, faithful Muslims are so deeply invested in their religion, one that dictates to them how they will live their lives from birth to death, morning to evening, waking and sleeping, turning to Mecca five times daily to prostrate themselves and pledge their devotion anew, that Islam inhabits their very marrow.  It is the controlling and the compelling force of their lives.

Insult Islam, and you assault the psyche of the Muslim.  There is nothing of greater value in that life than the surrender and the belief and the trust and the faith.  That surrender is absolute, for this is what is demanded of the faithful.  That surrender is so all-encompassing that it seems reasonable to the devout to feel it a great honour to give their very lives in honour of Islam.

Taking the 'name of the Lord' in vain used to be viewed as a horrible insult in Christianity.  Christianity has evolved, become a reasonable, not a passionately irrational factor in peoples' lives.  Islam has not evolved from its birth as a Bedouin religion to suit the lifestyle of a desert population whose tribal antipathies toward one another were finally bound in a covenant with one god.

One god who demanded tribute of utter conviction and complete surrender to his worship.  And a commitment to spread that divine attachment by word and by sword.  When the appeal of words did not succeed, then the sweeping charge of sword-wielding horsemen did.  And the ferocious intention of those now committed to violent jihad is merely a continuation of that original pact to enlarge the sweep of the faithful.

The Ummah is now represented by those faithful to Islam wherever they live, in the near East and the far East, in Africa and the Middle East, and increasingly in the West by steady infiltration of immigration conquest.  The spread of the culture and politics of the religion and the ideology that propels it has been intrusively inexorable, altering the culture and politics of societies it has infiltrated.

Those so deeply invested in Islam that an insult against its symbols becomes an intolerable assault against its believers' most intimate inner core of belief and being, demonstrate the fire of their rage through violence, threats and intimidation.  Theirs is the unbridled passion of complete surrender.  It is met with the puzzled rationality of Western attempts to placate that anger, that violence inspiring terror.

Islamists have learned that their incendiary anger engenders a satisfying degree of self-recrimination and appeasement from the West.  This is the West's surrender of their own values to appease that of the East.  An obvious interpretation by the East as 'guilty as charged'.  And the more they rage, the greater the efforts at appeasement, leading to the victory of success with each new surrender. 

In the United Nations and other public international forums the Muslim world is emboldened to insist that universal laws be structured and upheld by disciplinary laws that "Islamophobia" be declared "a crime against humanity".  Worded otherwise, in a more inclusive sugar-coating, that "blasphemy" be declared an unforgivable crime, and enforced by law.

So that, under the pretext of an organized outrage against an absurd little filmed charade portraying the Prophet Mohammed in a plot that history defends, the world is turned upside down by vicious protests against the evil West.  Leading the president of the most powerful country of the free world to intone within the UNited Nations: "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."

Must, then, the future belong to those who threaten, bellow insults at other religions, destroy other religions' sacred artefacts, plot to murder infidels, inspire terror in the world community while declaring themselves as performing the priceless work of God?  Must non-Muslims really continue to be held ransom to the collective rage of an ignorant Muslim mob?

"When one finishes parsing the sentence, one is left thinking the president of the United States agrees with Muslim mobs, and denouncing those who cause offence by ridiculting what others hold sacred can only mean admitting free speech should be abridged," opined Salim Mansur, political scientist, University of Western Ontario.

Or, as Salmon Rushdie puts it in his newly-published book Joseph Anton, "The greatest danger of the growing menace was that good men would commit intellectual suicide and call it peace.  Good men would give in to fear and call it respect."