Islamic Straw Dogs

Here we go again. An ill-made rather pathetic little video is released that is unkind to the Prophet Mohammad, and the Middle East erupts in an orgy of burning and killing. The West sucks it up and proffers apologies. Even Hillary Clinton, who should know better, felt the need to denounce the video. (I suspect she was pressured into the stance.) In any event, these actions did not stop the carnage, which is still going on as I write these words.

It is, of course, nonsense.

In 1979, Saudi fanatics (and that's saying something) attacked the Ka'aba in Mecca. The result? A retaliatory attack was immediately launched against the American Embassy in Islamabad, an action that gives an entirely new meaning to the term 'non-seqitur'. A new strategy begins to surface --  any slur against Muslims is to be laid at the door of the West, and particularly Israel and the United States.

Sometimes, of course, given the deranged activities that jihadists get up to, this is not possible, and, amazingly, Muslims are not offended. Fourteen thousand dead and disappeared youth in Pakistan-occupied Baluchistan, and not a murmur. 500,000 Muslim Darfuris killed by the Arab janjaweed, well, these things happen. The blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddha statues by the Taliban shrugged off without any protest whatsoever, other than thinking, "boys will be boys". And 20,000 dead Syrians you would think would cause an attack on Iran's Embassy. You would be wrong, and yet.... and here comes the crunch: a minor, mediocre video causes all hell to break loose, and an American ambassador killed. This almost, I say almost, creates a wish for the return of George W. Bush.

You see, to borrow from T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, the objective correlatives are all wrong. The real causes of all the mayhem have little to do with silly films, and everything to do with the power struggle between fundamentalist and moderate Islam. Illiterate youth are urged to focus on America, and under this aegis create the mayhem that allows sundry self-appointed imams, mullahs and ayatollahs to obtain power. It worked in Iran. Why not elsewhere?

Once in power, of course, the leaders immediately clamp down on any form of protest save one that focuses on the horror of Israel or the U.S.A. The leaders are there to 'protect' the populace, not unlike Oliver Cromwell's actions during his dictatorship. Indeed, Cromwell himself was termed "a Lord Protector" and this brought to mind a line from a book on English royalty whose title escapes me*: "Lord, protect us from Lord Protectors".

Devoutly to be wished.

*Didn't escape me. The book Lady S. refers to is an excellent work entitled Kings and Queens, by E. Farjeon and H. Farjeon. It has pride of place on my library shelf, next to Sellar and Yeatman's brilliant 1066 And All That. --Ed.