David Brooks, still behind that nasty Times Select wall, gets this rather right:
At first I sympathized with your anger at the Danish cartoons because it's impolite to trample on other people's religious symbols. But as the rage spread and the issue grew more cosmic, many of us in the West were reminded of how vast the chasm is between you and us. There was more talk than ever about a clash of civilizations. We don't just have different ideas; we have a different relationship to ideas.
I've been able to muster up little more than sadness over the cartoon controversy. Andrew Sullivan absurdly compares the rioters to the Nazis, complaining that now as then, The New York Times fails to recognize the danger. But these aren't the Nazis. The Nazis were a political movement commanding an industrialized, technologically-advanced society that they rapidly transformed into a war machine. They were more firmly fixed in modernity than the countries they initially attacked. They nearly exterminated a race and attempted to take over a continent. These extremists, in contrast, are so delicate and vulnerable that they can't countenance cartoons. And the rioters they've whipped up are, as is so often the case, mere pawns in a far larger game:
"It was no big deal until the Islamic conference when the O.I.C. took a stance against it," said Muhammad el-Sayed Said, deputy director of the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.
Sari Hanafi, an associate professor at the American University in Beirut, said that for Arab governments resentful of the Western push for democracy, the protests presented an opportunity to undercut the appeal of the West to Arab citizens. The freedom pushed by the West, they seemed to say, brought with it disrespect for Islam.
He said the demonstrations "started as a visceral reaction — of course they were offended — and then you had regimes taking advantage saying, 'Look, this is the democracy they're talking about.' "
The protests also allowed governments to outflank a growing challenge from Islamic opposition movements by defending Islam.
As is so often the case in the Middle East, the current paroxysms of violence are an interplay between societal rot, autocratic regimes, and fears of modernity. This is a tantrum thrown by an adult, and it is sad to watch.
