---

While the U.S. State Department-hoping to win friends in Iraq for the "American way"-deplores the impropriety in the Danish "Cartoon Crisis," it seems to take in stride, or in ignorance, the continuing anti-Semitic propaganda of Islamic organizations like Hezbollah in Lebanon, which fuels hatred of Israel through the broadcast of television programs such as Al-Shatat (The Diaspora). That series was bankrolled by Syria and broadcast in Lebanon in 2003 during the month of Ramadan, when Arab TV viewing peaks. It has been in reruns throughout the Middle East ever since.

Al-Shatat consists of twenty-nine episodes-presented daily, soap-opera style-which give a pseudo-history of the Zionist movement from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to the establishment of the State of Israel. The "information" it provides is distorted, false, and rife with anti-Jewish propaganda, caricature, and religious insult. The series, conceived in the spirit of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, focused on the ancient blood libel that the Jews use the blood of Christian children to make Passover matzoh (traditional Jewish unleavened bread) and on the "Jewish plot to take over the world." Pathetically enough, its melodramatic subtext was designed to curry favor in the "Christian West"-against the Jews. No one bothered to tell the producers how little secular Europe and distracted America cares about anti-Jewish libel-a blind spot, in terms of historical reality fixes that also explains Muslim incomprehension over Danish (and broader EU) blasphemy.

The reaction of the United States to this incitement? None at all. For the Jews, it was more of the same. No buildings were burned; no mullahs were killed. And the lesson: it is OK to pillory Jews and Christians, a tradition of polemic, caricature, and bitter satire that extends back into late antiquity, and by assimilation supports a habit of self-mockery and irony that makes Jewish (and maybe a few Catholic) comedians funnier than Evangelicals or Muslims. Perhaps the defining characteristic of any religious fundamentalism is its inability to laugh at a joke made at its own expense-as in, "Hal Lindsey, Osama bin Laden, and Baruch Goldstein walk into a bar. The bartender asks, 'Is this some kind of joke?'"

Forget clich"s about the "Culture Wars," "intolerance," "the other," "Crusader logic," and "Postcolonial Fatigue Syndrome." Social critic Ibn Warraq is correct in his recent commentary on the "Cartoon Crisis" that the modern West is the Mother of Reason and that no one in Denmark or France needs to be lectured on the value of tolerance. But he's wrong to think that Muslims care a fig about Reason that leaves Paradise behind. They're not reading Hume: they're reading the Muslim philosopher-theologian Al-Ghazali (1058-1111 c.e.), who decreed that it is a sacred duty to "suppress the enemies of religion through the jihad in His cause, and to gain their wealth, women, and lands until they surrender to Islam." (Indeed, one of the most amusing of the cartoons shows a worried, diminutive Prophet welcoming smoking suicide bombers with the caption, "Stop, stop-we ran out of virgins.") The tricky part of tolerance is that those who invoke it as victims hate it in principle.

The West may have an imperfect understanding of Islam; it does not have a completely false understanding of Islam. And the Great Lie that Western governments, especially the perennially incompetent Washington, urge along as it slouches toward Mecca to be born is that "understanding" and freedom of expression-even if it involves torching embassies and killing priests-is the solution to the history of the very incompetence that has led to the crisis.

It is time for the West to live and embrace the secularism it espouses, not to hide behind an outworn creed, a pagan pretense of religious magnanimity, a nutty and defeasible belief that religion is benign and thus should be protected. Expression-instantiated as murder, arson, and riot-proves that some religious views are toxic and cannot be tolerated. To be blunt, the same violent religious "expression" expressed by Jews or Christians domestically would land them in jail, not get them a slot on Oprah or a conversation with Bill Moyers.

Do we really do Muslims a favor by forgiving the trespasses we have brought into being through a century and a half of double dealing and political hypocrisy? Do we really want one rule book for secularized Christians and Jews (the vast majority), another for noisy, politically hyperactive, born-again Christians, and a third for noisy and lethal Muslims?

This image of Muhammad graces the north wall of the U. S. Supreme Court's chamber. The frieze by sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, completed in 1932, depicts Muhammad among 26 historical and legendary lawgivers. Muhammad is shown holding a Qur'an partly covered by his scimitar-a hint of violence to which American Muslims have periodically objected. After a complaint by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the court adopted incoherent language to describe the image: "a well-intentioned attempt by the sculptor . . . to honor Muhammad" but one that "bears no resemblance to Muhammad."

With regard to Islam, Europe and America have not educated or straight-talked; they have domineered, exploited, humiliated, colonized, expropriated, connived, and condescended to the Middle East, winking as the family Saud supplied their needs. They thought the whole world went to the moon in 1969-when the mullahs denied (and many believed them) that anyone had ever been there. It wasn't just a case of the calendar being lunar-a little fact we missed-but a question of whether by setting foot on the moon we had made it Christian. Now we want to know why Muslims fly planes into skyscrapers, bomb weddings in Tel Aviv, and set embassies ablaze in Beirut, when the centerpiece of their religious dignity, their Prophet, is ridiculed, as though he were merely one of them. One thing is certain: they do not do these things because they share with us a definition of peace or a sense of humor.

Quietly, we in the West think that Muslims are crazy, but we dare not say so. Publicly, we say that all religions are created equal, and that the West-really-loves Islam. The name itself comes from the Arabic word for peace, we're told. But it doesn't. It's derived from the word for surrender.

Europe did not create Islam, but it has been preternaturally stupid for centuries in its comprehension of Islamic theology. America may be forgiven, since its preternatural stupidity extends even to Europe. That is why America's desperate effort to curry favor among the Muslim populations of Europe and the Middle East (and at home) by trading free speech for religious tolerance-and oil-betrays its own confusion about the wide religious world that Islam inhabits. Our brightest jurists find themselves playing the role of biblical exegetes in relation to a religious situation Jefferson could not have imagined. Our politicians find themselves perched above a marketplace filled with buyers with funny names and ideas. Our closest allies, the Europeans, whom we privately detest but count on to explain the complexities of things beyond these shores, show us that their pockets are empty of explanations even if their hearts are in the right place.

Who would have guessed that the Prophet's turban, shown in the most famous cartoon as a bomb with its fuse burning down, would explode in (of all places) Scandinavia?