Denmark's Intifada

[gnjsdad]

Puts the “cartoon wars” in a more understandable context. Very interesting reading…

*Denmark is one of Europe’s smallest countries; it has only 5.5 million inhabitants. Until the beginning of this year it was known mainly for dairy products, butter cookies, Legos, and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. However, conservative Europeans had been watching Denmark for some time. Since Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s center-right coalition came to power in 2001, Copenhagen has introduced the most sensible immigration policies in Europe. *

*Today, Denmark is at the center of a controversy over 12 drawings, the infamous Danish cartoons. Syria and Iran have virtually declared war on Denmark, Danish consulates and embassies have been attacked in the Middle East and Africa, and Islamic countries are officially boycotting Danish products. *Those who believe that the whole issue has to do with 12 cartoons are naïve. Denmark is being punished for its alleged Islamophobia. Its crime is not the publication of 12 drawings in Jyllands-Posten, a paper in the rural province of Jutland. Its crime is the staunch refusal of the Danish Vikings to allow Muslim immigrants to impose their laws upon their host country.

The entire article…

 

[gilliam]

Denmark has had a problem in this area now for awhile. The problem is spreading throughout Europe. It will just be a matter of time for it to be a major problem in France and the UK.

 

[gilliam]

People may be interested in this book:

In case you only walk in to a book store occasionally, you might not have noticed that Oriana Fallaci’s penultimate book, The Force of Reason, was published in English last week. As polemic goes, it is hard to beat. Especially in the wake of the cartoon intifada, it will strike many readers as extraordinarily prescient and in most regards both comforting and distressing. Distressing, because Oriana Fallaci is not optimistic about the future of the West. Comforting, because in writing to our fears she reminds us that there are people out there – eloquent, passionate, dying, European people – who appreciate that we are in the fight of our generation, if not our civilization.

One need not agree with everything Oriana Fallaci writes to admire her courage for writing it and the style with which she writes it.

Rather than review the book – I am about six books behind in promised reviews to begin with – I will simply excerpt the first five pages of Chapter 1, and let you decide whether you should buy and read The Force of Reason immediately, or wait until you are out of the conversation at all the least politically correct cocktail parties. Remember that she wrote the following well before the French riots of November or the systematic effort by Muslim activists around the world to coerce Denmark’s government into qualifying one of its most cherished civil liberties:

tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2006/03/new-fallaci.html

Also read:

NEW YORK–Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids–so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview–one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the “vilipendio,” or “vilification,” of “any religion admitted by the state.”

In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year–and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe–called “The Force of Reason.” Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the “sons of Allah.” So in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years’ imprisonment for her beliefs–which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment. It is a shame, in so many ways, that “vilipend,” the latinate word that is the p(name removed by moderator)oint equivalent in English of the Italian offense in question, is scarcely ever used in the Anglo-American lexicon; for it captures beautifully the pomposity, as well as the anachronistic outlandishness, of the law in question. A “vilification,” by contrast, sounds so sordid, so tabloid–hardly fitting for a grande dame.

opinionjournal.com/columnists/tvaradarajan/?id=110006858

 

[Franze]

I support completely Denmark.