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The nonsense this past week about Islam telling the West that the West can no longer have free speech, is of a piece with an observation I made recently about Iran:
Ahmadinejad wants to convince the world that, due to his control over a significant part of the world's oil supply, that position of affairs has already been reached -- Iran can use its oil to blackmail the world right now -- the world is already unable (so Ahmadinejad wants us to believe) to prevent Iran from forcing other nations to do its bidding.
The surrender of Gaza by Israel to the Palestinians has no doubt encouraged this. Fundamentalist Islamists are so encouraged that they feel the time is right to declare themselves our masters.
It is likely that they also realize that with the tremendous gains of freedom in the Middle East, time may be running out for them to make such a declaration. From Mark Steyn (on 12-5-05):
Meanwhile, Iraq's experiment in Arab liberty has had ripple effects beyond its borders, pushing the Syrians most of the way out of Lebanon, and in Syria itself significantly weakening Baby Assad's regime. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who's spent years as a beleaguered democracy advocate in Egypt, told the Washington Post's Jim Hoagland the other day that, although he'd opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, he had to admit it had "unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be the midwives."
The tide is turning against Islamic fundamentalism in the heart of the Mid-East; Islamists realize this may be their last chance to seek to blackmail the West via oil to do its bidding.
But the demands of the Islamofascists were met by a massive reprinting of the cartoons in many European publications, and the broadcasting of them on TV.
The greatest significance of this is that radical Islamists have made a potentially fatal misstep: they have threatened the very mainstream media on which they depend. Surely every reporter in the free world has just realized that his livelihood is threatened and that the fundamental Islamists would like to tape over his mouth.
