Scott Johnson, writing at Powerline, quotes Daniel Pipes, writing about the “Cartoon Intifada,” with a piece in the New York Sun, Cartoons and Islamic imperialism.

The key issue at stake in the battle over the 12 Danish cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad is this: Will the West stand up for its customs and mores, including freedom of speech, or will Muslims impose their way of life on the West? Ultimately, there is no compromise: Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not.

More specifically, will Westerners accede to a double standard by which Muslims are free to insult Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, while Muhammad, Islam, and Muslims enjoy immunity from insults? Muslims routinely publish cartoons far more offensive than the Danish ones. Are they entitled to dish it out while being insulated from similar indignities?
***
Germany's Die Welt newspaper hinted at this issue in an editorial: "The protests from Muslims would be taken more seriously if they were less hypocritical. When Syrian television showed drama documentaries in prime time depicting rabbis as cannibals, the imams were quiet." Nor, by the way, have imams protested the stomping on the Christian cross embedded in the Danish flag.

The deeper issue here, however, is not Muslim hypocrisy but Islamic supremacism. The Danish editor who published the cartoons, Flemming Rose, explained that if Muslims insist "that I, as a non-Muslim, should submit to their taboos ... they're asking for my submission."

Pipes concludes: "Peoples who would stay free must stand unreservedly with Denmark."

Submission is exactly what is sought. And any form of appeasement creates exactly the kinds of incentives that will only encourage more of the same. Islamic Fundamentalist forces have orchestrated this “spontaneous outrage,” complete with prestaged Danish flags and “fake but accurate” supplemental cartoons that generate greater provocation.

We are being manipulated, and those too naïve or lazy to see the forces at work play right into the hands of the master manipulators, who are creating this controversy from whole cloth. All the while, Arab world press makes an tradition of generating the most offensive caricatures of Jews, Israelis and Americans.

Stand by the Danes, indeed. Either our civilization is worth fighting this not so subtle oppression through violence and threats of violence, or it isn’t.

A true liberalism would recognize the threat posed by these mono-culturalists is infinitely greater than those countries who stand beleaguered by such barbarism, hate and intolerance.

The forces we fight clearly and without artifice adopted the very ideas, techniques, and grotesqueries as the Hitlerian archetypes they emulate. That the unsuspecting left can be so oblivious to the true nature of this threat is greatly dismaying, however predictable.

Submit. Or be killed. Those are the only two options for the infidels.

Unless, of course, we take them at their word that we’re at war, and attack them where we find them.