Nigerian Barbarian Muslims Crucify Cat to Protest Stupid Film
Whenever Muslims do some childish barbaric thing like this, you can always be assured that somebody will immediately show up to say, “NO! YOU!” and try to find some stupid moral equivalence argument proving that plump American suburbanites are always and everywhere morally and culturally indistinguishable from these thin-skinned childish savages who cannot cope with somebody making fun of their religion. This is known as Manning’s Corollary:
In any online conversation about an incident of violence perpetrated by adherents of Islamic fundamentalism, the conversation will inevitably devolve into claims that Christians commit the same type and degree of violent acts, regardless of how demonstrably false that is; further, the claim will be made that past historical violence involving Christians means that present-day Christians are morally incapable of denouncing current violence involving Muslims.
Always studiously ignored is the shocking body count that resulted from release of “The Last Temptation of Christ”, the publication of “The Da Vinci Code” and the release of “Piss Christ” a few years back (current death toll: 0 — doubling daily!). The simple fact is: the West has largely learned to cope with religious diversity. Islam has not. In regions where the Western tradition is dominant, Islam is treated, largely with respect. In places where Islam is dominant, other religions are oppressed, not to mention brutalized. Sure there are lots of Muslims who have adapted to Western culture, formed friendships and relationships of mutual respect with non-Muslims. I’ve met some really wonderful Muslim folk online and, in particular, would recommend Dilshad Ali if you want to meet a lovely and good woman who is just trying to raise her family right in the sight of God. There are many more like her. But globally Islam, as a culture-forming system, seem to be in serious crisis in that it appears to be unable to form the antibodies that kill the cells of radicalism multiplying in the Umma. The biggest danger sane Muslims face is not non-Muslims, but other Muslims. If you want an analogy, imagine a Catholic commuhion where the Fred Phelps and Richard Williamson types were not the uber-marginalized fringe whack jobs, but the lionized and broadly popular bad boy rebels against the boring, accomodationist bourgeois Old Regime.
I still think it’s an open question whether Islam is getting stronger or is simply getting more and more brittle. One thing I do know, it is the worst sort of patronizing infantilizing Western claptrap to believe for one second that respect needs to be accorded thugs who crucify cats and behead helpless nuns everytime some jerk with a webcam decides to pull the Prophet’s nose. The great advantage Christianity has over Islam is that it begins with and is founded upon a man covered in spittle, laughed at as the scum of the earth and despised and rejected. “Piss Christ” is small beer compared to the real contempt heaped upon the real Jesus. And Jesus himself commands his followers to turn the other cheek. Islam begins with power, not weakness, and the expectation of military conquest of the world for God. Consequently, it has never known what to do with defeat besides cherish a rankling sense of privilege wrongly denied. This is a bad posture for learning from mistakes, which is why so much of the Islamosphere remains on the cutting edge of 8th century social thought. If postmodern moral relativists were smart–which they aren’t or they would not be postmodern moral relativists–they would realize that the only sane response to the diseased spirituality of inflamed radical Islam is not the diseased watery spirituality of the relativist, hedonist, deconstructionist, watery semi-pagan spirituality of the post-Christian West, but the healthy spirituality of the orthodox Catholic tradition.
