We have created a folkway according to which whoever manages to shout first that he feels offended has won half the points in the game. Being able to prove anything by the criteria of reasonable men is only good for a fraction of the total score.

As I am an avid reader of my newspapers’ “letters to the editor” I notice that the response to the cartoon controversy here in Europe is changing. Initially, when there was more “puff” than “fire” from the “dragon,” the letters and the editorials asserted “We are all Danes now.” Then the protests turned violent. With that the pitch changed. The original “courage of citizenship” took on a new color, as befits a good chameleon. There is now less to be heard about the freedom of the press than about good taste. Under pressure the view of the rubbery-backbone crowd changed.

Were the cartoons good? “Not great” was the convenient answer – as though this would be the issue – and so inadvertently it was insinuated that bad comics are a proper reason to riot. By now the indigenous PC artillery had found its target. Good taste and behavior, sensitivity, and the wisdom to appease became the new mantra. Those who paid attention could learn a lot. Sensitivity and tolerance required on the part of “A” towards “B” obviously does not include not burning “A’s” churches or looting “A”-owned stores by “B”. And, it was added, because a decade ago Jyllands-Posten refused to publish anti-Christian material in Denmark, it was obliged to refrain from showing a Danish public whatever Muslims find offensive.

What one reads now by the light of burning flags suggests that Europe is caving in. It is worth noting that the collapse-in-slow-motion is not caused by the arguments supporting a retreat. The rout is less related to ideas than to the violence exhibited by Islamists on their own turf and the actual and threatened rampage by Muslim immigrants in Europe. Some of these folks claim to have been in jeopardy at home and therefore left, not for Iran or Sudan but for the lands of the Unbelievers. The discrepancy between alleged faith and practical savvy would be worth a commentary – if that were not superfluous.

There is, however, a good point among the apologists’ plea for retreat from the principles whose defense has become difficult. While Islamists demand “respect” for their creed in terms to be defined by them, they are also arguing for what amounts to laws enforcing their dictate abroad. This would incrementally make violations of their doctrine in non-Muslim countries a suppressed activity. In support of this demand the case of the, in Europe widespread, legislation designed to bar a National Socialist revival is cited. These laws forbid things such as Nazi organizations, the display of swastikas, depicting Hitler in a favorable light and, controversially, they make the denial of the Holocaust a crime.

Such laws have a telling weakness of omission: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Gulag, red stars and CPs are not included. While anti-Nazi, these commandments are not consequently anti-totalitarian. I have always felt that Jewish organizations should have insisted on an anti-totalitarian consistency here. Letting the Holocaust become a unique event might have brought tempting initial tactical advantages but it has hardly served the cause of preventing the repetition of the past. By taking the Holocaust out of its totalitarian context the original event was allowed to become an embalmed mummy. Detached from current affairs – what is unique is irrelevant as a pattern for the future – the Shoa became the subject of ritualistic incantations but lost its utility to serve the future.

Earlier this week David Irving got a three year sentence in Austria for denying the Holocaust in 1989. Personally, since I am old enough to have “seen it,” I am greatly irritated by Holocaust deniers. Nevertheless, it seems that making bad history into a crime ill serves the cause it is supposed to defend. To some, state pressure legitimizes those who claim that the six million Jews and the further five million of assorted victims “just did not happen.” No law is needed to make “the earth is flat” or “2x2=5” legally actionable. The way to deal with such retards and their equally bright followers is exposure while we hammer them into the ground. Granted, a few believers will be left. However, these will be properly isolated residents of their self-constructed political nut house. What they attack gains in stature. Forbidding them only lends them significance and converts their activity into a profitable underground industry.

The existence of such laws is now used to tiptoe to the claim that whatever insults Islam in the eyes of its radical devotees be also banned. This assertion seems to score. If one opinion can be made illegal because it is defamation then why not extend the list when new claims roll in? Long ago a complementary step was taken in this direction when the legislation was extended to criminalize much that is considered non-PC by the Left. Just try mentioning that two out of three people in local jails are “refugees” from abroad!

In actual fact there seems to be a difference between laws punishing, let us say, Holocaust deniers and forbidding utterances that elaborate on a possible correlation between Islam, violence and any bad habits Muhammad might have had. Forbidding the public advocacy of “The Holocaust Lie” in Europe means that sanctions are applied in a matter that was a component of the havoc that almost extinguished the civilization that is home-grown in this part of the world. Regardless of what one might think of them, such ordinances are an upshot of local experience and constitute the internal business of those to whom the regulations apply. People outside of the world of Islam are quite often critical of its practices and of the concept of the Sharia in general. Nevertheless it is doubtful that, even if it were possible to assemble the critics in the industrialized world, a decent riot could be organized of people who feel insulted by the treatment of women or the cruel and unusual punishment of law-breakers. Even demonstrations against fatwas to kill outside Islam’s turf or to make it a deadly offence to leave Islam, would not fill a narrow street in the historical center of an old city.

To conclude, Holocaust laws are a local matter in Europe and its overseas mutations. Islamic concepts are alien concerns. Those who choose to live in a foreign place must accept its formal and informal rules. It is unreasonable to expect to take along in one’s luggage next to clean underwear all one’s preferred rights and regulations from home. This is true even if there is some readiness to grant the courtesy of reciprocity – which, by the way, is clearly denied. Given this insistence that they be allowed to proceed in the two-way traffic as though it were a one-way-street, some Moslems end up taking a stance they should shy away from. As things are made to stand, the fronts are understandably hardening. This is an inevitable reaction to what seems to be their Islamist spokesmen’s insistence: “You shall live your life by our rules even in your place.”