...Augmenting the physical violence is the rhetoric of violence--in the street, in the newly acquired halls of power, and on the current and prospective battlefields. In the street, around Europe, Islamic protesters threaten the West. Marching in London, they brandished murderous banners, including: massacre those who insult islam; butcher those who mock islam; britain, you will pay: 7/7 on its way; and europe, your 9/11 will come. In Gaza, demonstrators demanded the hands of cartoonists be cut off, and an imam at the Omari Mosque declared, to 9,000 of the faithful, "We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible." Calls to slaughter Islam's putative enemies, such as "Death to Denmark" in Pakistan, are apparent commonplaces of the protests. More specific death threats against publishers and cartoonists alike, including a bounty of $1 million for the murder of the Danish cartoonists, seek to silence those political Islam has declared as enemies and intimidate others from speaking out.

This is not normal politics. This is not even the normal excess of normal politics. Imagine what European and American commentators would say if tens of thousands of Americans, Britons, Germans, or Israelis marched with calls for the murder of Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, or Muslims in response to a few anti-American, anti-European, or anti-Semitic cartoons appearing in one, or a few, Arab or Islamic newspapers. Yet Western politicians and commentators have mostly indulged this outpouring of violent hatred. Even when decrying it, they blame the cartoons' publishers and express pious regret that the cartoons insulted the Prophet Mohammed and Muslims, as if there is any normal political cause and effect (let alone a proportionate one) operating here. This Western indulgence is extremely wrongheaded and self-injurious. It cloaks the political Islamic proto-intifada in a measure of legitimacy. It emboldens its instigators and its shock troops in the street, revealing the West's unwillingness to respond resolutely to these verbal and physical assaults with moral, rhetorical, and political clarity, and to convey the unapologetic message that the West's people and polities refuse to be attacked, intimidated, and cowed...