Appeasement, circa 2006

Theodore Dalrymple, in City Journal,on the London protests against cartoons:

The weekend edition of Le Monde carried on its front page a startling photograph of a masked protester in London, holding up a placard demanding the death of those who insult Islam. Policemen flanked him on either side, as if protecting him from the vicious assaults of cartoonists.

Nothing could have captured better the cowardly and pusillanimous response of the British government to the crisis deliberately stirred up in many Muslim countries four months after the publication in a Danish newspaper of 12 cartoons depicting Muhammad (only one of which was remotely funny).

In condemning the cartoons, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, a man with all the qualities of Neville Chamberlain except his fundamental decency, attempted to curry favor with the Muslim world, or at least to avoid its wrath. Revealing the practical value of such appeasement is the way in which Muslims burned down the Danish consulates and embassies even after the Danes, with equal cowardice, had apologized. But at least the Danes have the excuse of being a very small nation indeed — although their country produces far more, oil excepted, than the whole Arab world put together.

What started as an attempt to raise awareness in one country, has recently ballooned to encompass most of the Islamic world . . . and the surprise "aggressor" is Denmark. Of all the western countries, Denmark would be among the least likely place for something like this to start, and the Danish government appears to have been taken unsuspecting as much as anyone else.