Daniel Pipes has a terrific piece in today’s New York Sun (there entitled “A Look at Islamic Violence,” but it bears the title above at his website.) In it, he notes that “the violence by Muslims responding to comments by the pope fit a pattern that has been building and accelerating since 1989. Six times since then, Westerners did or said something that triggered death threats and violence in the Muslim world.”
Those six are the Rushdie incident; the refusal of the Supreme Court in 1997 to remove a statue of Muhammad from the main court chamber; Jerry Falwell’s calling Muhammad a terrorist in 2002; the Qur’an-flushing affair; Cartoon Rage; and now Pope Rage.
Pipes notes how these displays of outrage are orchestrated from above, and concludes:
No conspiracy lies behind these six rounds of inflammation and aggression, but examined in retrospect, they coalesce and form a single, prolonged campaign of intimidation, with surely more to come. The basic message — “You Westerners no longer have the privilege to say what you will about Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an, Islamic law rules you too” — will return again and again until Westerners either do submit or Muslims realize their effort has failed.
Precisely. Diana West and Cliff May have also noted the same thing.