"It is evident that we must protect freedom of expression."
~ Nicolas Sarkozy, French Interior Minister

"The civil administration shall take no cognizance of religion."
~ James Madison, "The Federalist Papers"

“In European countries, with a large or growing Moslem minority, there is a real fear that behind the demand for respect hides another agenda: the threat that everyone must adjust to the rules of Islam."
~ Dutch newspaper editorial from NRC Handelsblad

"I prefer mass caricature to mass censorship." With these words French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy boldly stated the case for western liberal pluralism over eastern theocratic tyranny. The current overkill of "outrage" by Moslems protesting the cartoons of Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper not only brings into stark relief the clash of civilizations we are engaged in, but also underlines the degree of lies and manipulations to which radical Moslem leaders will go in order to incite violence.

Immigrants, from whatever country or race or creed cannot descend on the industrialized west hoping to improve their economic conditions and at the same time demanding, in the case of Moslems, that the west abandon centuries of freedom for the statist faith their religious demands dictate. If they want financial benefits from our free economies, they must also respect the liberties of our free polities.

The lack of ability of many Moslems to acculturate and acclimatize to the west has less to do with the color of their skin than with the content of their character. Their radical leaders incite the broad base of the faithful to believe that freedom of religion implies state sanction of their parochial particularities and state surrender for redress to any perceived slight. This is their great failing. And this is their greatest threat to us.

Freedom of religion guarantees only that everyone has a right to worship in their own fashion without restriction or resistance from any state authority. Conversely, that freedom also implies that all people must have the freedom to be let alone from religion if they so choose, without any coercion from any group. Freedom of religion does not imply, nor has it ever implied, state support for religious sects, institutions or any restrictions on free expression concerning religion, or religious groups, except those expressions that incite to violence.

After three hundred years of religious wars, the western world--through exhaustion if nothing else--came to accept the necessity of a strict division between church and state. And with the ideas of Locke, Rousseau and Burke lighting the way, western liberal pluralism was born. These ideas have not yet even begun to be discussed in the Arab Islamist Middle Rim of this small planet from the borders of Pakistan to the Moroccan Atlantic coast. The reason is simple. These lands adhere to a statist faith. There have been no schisms as the west saw between Catholics and Protestants, and the various sects therein. Religious law, Sha'ria justice, remains embedded in the legal codes of these nations. To them mosque and state are one.

This is the standard to which the radical leaders of Islam adhere. When the President of Iran, the leaders of Al-Qaeda, Iraqi clerics like Moqtada al-Sadr, and the Saudi Wahhabis preach of the restoration of twelve-century Islamic hegemony over the world, they should be taken at their word. The back story to the current wave of "spontaneous demonstrations" shows just how far they are prepared to go in subverting truth and perverting justice. To this philosophy; to these men; to those who follow them; the west owes nothing.

To those who think this issue arose suddenly and recently, think again. It is a case study of what Stalin called "...the big lie readily accepted by the broad masses..."

This "sudden" explosion of protests was started a full five months after the cartoons were first published in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. Ahmed Abu Laban is the most prominent of a group of Danish imams and activists who toured the Middle East late last year, seeking to "internationalize" their campaign of protest at the cartoons, after deciding their complaints were falling on deaf ears in Denmark.

Mr. Abu Laban, who maintains an office at the Waqfs Mosque in Copenhagen, said that the sudden explosion of anger at the end of last month was due to the rapid success of a "grass-roots" consumer boycott against Danish dairy goods and other exports. Some grass! Some roots!

Mr. Abu Laban, a 60-year-old imam of Palestinian origin, helped organize the hardline "Salafist" television stations based in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, such as al-Majd and Iqra, in fomenting the trade boycott. He also enlisted Moslem clerics. Abu Laban has said "...nobody is denying the role of the mosques. They have loudspeakers, and the people listen." The problem is who they are listening to and what lies they are being told.

One Danish Muslim delegation was sent to Cairo to meet the secretary general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, and the grand mufti of Egypt, and to al-Azhar University, where it met the grand imam, Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi. Mr. Abu Laban then lead a delegation to Qatar, to meet the influential cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, whose fatwas, or religious rulings, are considered binding by many Muslims.

It is time that all the Islamist apologists in the west understood that the European Moslem protests are not so much home-grown as instigated, manipulated and directed by a Mid-East cabal of religious fanatics.

Apparently Mr. Abu Laban's hypocrisy knows no bounds. After he condemned the demonstrations and boycott of Danish goods on Danish television, he turned right around and told the al-Jazeera channel that he was "happy" about it.

As Islamist protests grew, Mr. Abu Laban and his henchmen had another thing to be "happy" about. A small Muslim immigrant organization published a drawing on its Web site of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank. "Write this one in your diary, Anne," Hitler was shown as saying. The group, the Arab European League, said it was exercising its right of "...artistic expression..." In contrast to Moslem reaction, Jews in Europe aren't marching and torching.

One of the most tragic effects of all this has been on the Moslem community of Europe itself. Tabish Khair, professor of English at the University of Aarhus in Denmark has said that, "The moderate Muslim has again been effectively silenced."

He points to the case in 2005 of a Moroccan-Dutch painter, Rachid Ben Ali, who went into hiding after receiving death threats related to an exhibit showing "hate imams" spitting bombs. And, most infamously, the case in 2004, of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered for committing what his confessed killer called blasphemy in his film, "Submission," about violence against Islamic women.

Even in the land of Churchill the corrosive effects of this street terror has many analysts concerned that the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair is ready to promote self-censorship when dealing with Islamic militancy in the interest of averting further terrorist attacks. "Islam is protected by an invisible blasphemy law," said Jasper Gerard, a columnist in The Sunday Times. "It is called fear." It is also called appeasement. And as Churchill once said, "An appeaser is someone who feeds the crocodile hoping he will eat him last."

The Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad editorialized that, "In America, few people fear that they will have to live according to the norms of Islam. In European countries, with a large or growing Moslem minority, there is a real fear that behind the demand for respect, hides another agenda: the threat that everyone must adjust to the rules of Islam. The possibility exists that the Moslem immigration is setting off a new generation of European religious wars."

Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, which first published the cartoons, insisted last week that his interest lay solely in asserting the right to free speech over religious taboos. "When Moslems say you are not showing respect, I would say: you are not asking for my respect, you are asking for my submission," he said.

But the east is wrong. There will never be submission. For the west's answer was handed down to us as a legacy by Winston Churchill himself. "Victory at all costs. Victory through all pain. Victory despite all terror."