Seconded, heartily. And while we’re at it, Omar says:

You know that those cartoons were published for the 1st time months ago and we here in the Middle East have tonnes of jokes about Allah, the prophets and the angels that are way more offensive, funny and obscene than those poorly-made cartoons, yet no one ever got shot for telling one of those jokes or at least we had never seen rallies and protests against those infidel joke-tellers.

What I want to say is that I think the reactions were planned to be exaggerated this time by some Middle Eastern regimes and are not mere public reaction.
And I think Syria and Iran have the motives to trigger such reactions in order to get away from the pressures applied by the international community on those regimes.

However, I cannot claim that Muslim community is innocent for there have been outrageous reactions outside the range of Syria’s or Iran’s influence but again, these protests and threats are more political than religious in nature.

It’s always good to check in with Omar on these things, just to hear what an actual reasonable, intelligent Muslim has to say.

But his post touches on the whole problem with radical Islam: the religious IS political, and that in turn is antithetical to what Western Civ is supposed to be all about, which is emancipation from dogma of any kind, and freedom of thought and expression — and not, as some would have it, some bowdlerized, lily-livered notion of “tolerance.” Which is why both the military and political wings of militant Islamism must be resisted just as unyieldingly as we can possibly manage…with a pack of cowardly Leftists nipping at our heels every step of the way, trying to get us to recognize the “arrogant”, un-PC nature of our intransigence and just surrender already, that is.

And here’s more on the political-not-religious motivation behind this conflict:

The “rage machine” was set in motion when the Muslim Brotherhood–a political, not a religious, organization–called on sympathizers in the Middle East and Europe to take the field. A fatwa was issued by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a Brotherhood sheikh with his own program on al-Jazeera. Not to be left behind, the Brotherhood’s rivals, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party) and the Movement of the Exiles (Ghuraba), joined the fray. Believing that there might be something in it for themselves, the Syrian Baathist leaders abandoned their party’s 60-year-old secular pretensions and organized attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and Beirut.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s position, put by one of its younger militants, Tariq Ramadan–who is, strangely enough, also an adviser to the British home secretary–can be summed up as follows: It is against Islamic principles to represent by imagery not only Muhammad but all the prophets of Islam; and the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. Both claims, however, are false.

Read the rest, it’s interesting stuff. My take is simply this: if the rage-merchants want more war, they damned well ought to get as much of it as we can jam down their gullets — because neither the modern world nor moderate Muslims (however numerous they may or may not be) need tolerate the theofascists any longer, and the sooner we’re rid of them, the better.