Hamlet’s question, updated by Roger Kimball

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Feb 05, 2006 11:01 AM

Hamlet’s question, updated

by Roger Kimball

Once again, Mark Steyn hits the nail on the head, puts the arrow in the bullseye, gets it just right. When the Danish newspaper printed 12 cartoon’s of Mohammed, it not only meant to be provocative, but also to demonstrate the limits of tolerance. Their two misjudgments: 1) those limits turned out to be a lot narrower than they imagined and 2) support from the good guys, the devotees of tolerance and multicultural understanding, turned out to be exceedingly thin on the ground.

In a normal world, a satirical cartoon provokes a laugh or a mutter, at most a letter to the editor. In the world of the Islamists--i.e., "really existing" Europe--it provokes murderous demonstrations, arson, and death threats. Again, in a normal world, when a bunch of ravening fanatics take to the streets and start burning your national flag and your embassy in some God-forsaken Middle-Eastern satrap, you stand up to the madmen. You might, for example, put the demonstrators in jail. You might also run those cartoons in every major paper for the next month. And you might expect your friends in other countries to do likewise.

That’s in a normal world. In our world, you go into full-grovel mode, apologizing to the people who are burning your embassies and firing journalists who have the temerity to dissent. As Steyn points out, it’s the "sensitive" thing to do.

One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they’ll marvel at how easy it all was. You don’t need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that’s a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural "sensitivity," the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want -- including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, hailed the "sensitivity" of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending cartoons.
No doubt he’s similarly impressed by the "sensitivity" of Anne Owers, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, for prohibiting the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and thus is offensive to Muslims. And no doubt he’s impressed by the "sensitivity" of Burger King, which withdrew its ice cream cones from its British menus because Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe complained that the creamy swirl shown on the lid looked like the word "Allah" in Arabic script. I don’t know which sura in the Koran says don’t forget, folks, it’s not just physical representations of God or the Prophet but also chocolate ice cream squiggly representations of the name, but ixnay on both just to be "sensitive."

Is he, could he possibly be making this up? Alas, no: see for example, this story. Steyn has many other examples of suicidal paralysis--I mean "sensitivity." But here is the gravamen of the situation. Our Enlightened, "tolerant," soi-disant multicultural elites just don’t know what concessions to make to people like this. Where’s it all headed? I fear Steyn may be right:

One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there’s very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and Sharia. As a famously sensitive Dane once put it, "To be or not to be, that is the question."

I think of Hilaire Belloc’s little ditty: "Pale Ebeneezer thought it wrong to fight/ But roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right."

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