Nice civilization you got here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.
That was the sinister subtext of a letter addressed to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, asking him to "take all those responsible to task under law" for the infamous Mohammed cartoons. The letter is remarkable for when it was sent and for who sent it.
The letter was signed by the eleven ambassadors of Islamic or heavily-Islamic countries. Libya, Algeria, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Palestine, Indonesia, Morocco, and Bosnia-Herzegovina complained about the Jyllands-Posten cartoons on October 12, long before the current round of protests.
If that state-security scenario sounds too conspiratorial for you, the alternative is no more reassuring: these signatories of the letter know that their nations are not in control at all. Radical Islamists are calling the shots, and there is nothing Islamic states can do to stop them.
If that is the case, it is a surprising and devastating indictment of global Islam. It is one thing for American pundits and politicians to say the Religion of Peace has been hijacked by violent extremists; it's far more frightening when the warning comes from the governments that know it best.
Clinton W. Taylor is a lawyer and a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford. He was a David L. Boren National Security Program Fellow in 2000, and a 2005 Publius Fellow with the Claremont Institute.
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