Time Immortal

Following the arrests of three Muslims for plotting to kill Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who drew Muhammad wearing a bomb turban, the Danish media have today republished the offending illustration.

Good for them. The minute it became clear that violence and intimidation were the response the western press should have said: Okay, you want to kill one of us, you’ll have to kill us all. The Danes have now taken an important stand against Islamic encroachments on freedom of expression.

In Canada, by contrast, the state hauled the only publisher of the cartoons, my old boss Ezra Levant, into one of its thought-crime courts at the behest of a raving incoherent imam. And all the jelly-spined squish of a Minister of Justice has done is issue lamely evasive talking points. Nonetheless, the imam has now folded, and is calling (insofar as I can follow him) for the matter to be settled according to Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code or some Islamic understanding thereof. Ezra is going on the offensive.

The lesson is, if you face down these bullies, you can win and stop the lights going out on liberty. But you won’t get much help from your government.

Good on the Danes for this. There really is only one proper response to terror and bullying — stand up to it, maybe even do again whatever you did in the first place to anger the bully.

That’s a truth one learns even on the playground at school. It’s a pity that most world leaders seem to have forgotten that lesson by the time they become presidents and prime ministers, chancellors and…well, whatever.

I never learned to fight, not in the sense of taking a martial art or being shown by my father how to throw a right hook properly. And personally, I’m not keen on fighting when it can be avoided. But I know how to throw a punch, and I have a pretty decent idea of what parts of the human anatomy to aim for if I need to make the first hit hurt.

When I was in the first grade, I got picked on an awful lot, especially by two boys in particular. One of them had me cornered on the second level of the playground one particular recess, and wouldn’t let up. Until that point, I’d been trying to be a bit more passive in my defiance, shrugging off the slights and what have you. Not this time. This time, I turned around and punched the kid right in the chest. He stumbled backward through the gap in the railing where the sliding pole was; it was February, so the sand below was still icy and hard.

He never messed with me again. In fact, when next I ran into him (in high school), we got along just fine.

That’s a fact about life that I hope my kids are able to learn one day, and a fact about life that I think we all need to keep in mind when we look at how we deal with the world. Creating conflict for conflict’s sake is not right, obviously, but there are some things which we simply cannot afford to tolerate, lest we invite the antagonist(s) to take further advantage of us; only be resisting, with as much force as is required, can we actually effect meaningful, positive change.

That’s certainly the case with radical Islam, and the Danes deserve all applause for refusing to be cowed by the fact that some of their immigrant citizens have been plotting murder and mayhem. That they have republished the offending cartoon in spite of the threat of violence is the right decision, because it speaks volumes about how violent reprisals against freedom of expression, even odious freedom of expression, can not, must not, and will not be tolerated.

The world needs as much of that right now as it can possibly get.