In 1945, the anti-Nazi German pastor Martin Niemoller wrote the following:
"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't
a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I
wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there
was no one left to speak up for me."

This famous statement can be updated for Europeans:

First they came for Israel, and we didn't speak up because we weren't Jews.
Then they came for Lebanon's Christians, and we didn't speak up because we
weren't Maronites. Then they came for America, and we didn't speak up
because we weren't Americans. Then they came for Sudan's blacks, and we
didn't speak up because we weren't Sudanese blacks. Then they came for us,
and by that time there was no one left to speak up for us.

As long as Muslim demonstrators only shouted "Death to America" and "Death
to Israel," Europe (and the rest of the world's Left) found reasons either
to ignore the Nazi-like evil inherent in those chants (and the homicidal
actions that flowed from them) or to blame America and Israel for the
hatred.

But like the earlier Nazis, our generation's fascists hate anything good,
not merely Jews and Americans. And now the Damascus embassy of Norway, a
leading anti-Israel "peace at any price" country, has been torched. And more
and more Norwegians, and Brits, and French, and Dutch, and Swedes, and the
rest of the European appeasers who blamed America for 9/11 and blamed Israel
for Palestinian suicide bombings, are beginning to wonder whether there just
might be something morally troubling within the Islamic world.

Some on the Left here and in Europe are beginning to reassess whether
America and Israel or their Islamic enemies are at fault.

The fact that major newspapers in most Western European countries published
some or all of the cartoons that triggered the riots against Denmark, the
country in which the offending cartoons of Muhammad first appeared, was a
statement that at least some in Europe have had it with appeasement of
Islamic violence.

And here in America, a left-of-center columnist for the Los Angeles Times,
Tim Rutten, just wrote: "It's no longer possible to overlook the culture of
intolerance, hatred and xenophobia that permeates the Islamic world."

As it happens, I have sympathy with the notion that newspapers and others
need to be sensitive to religious, including Muslim, sensibilities. However,
when Muslim governments and religious spokesmen attack the West for its
insensitivity to Muslims and its anti-Muslim prejudice, one has entered the
Twilight Zone. Because nowhere in the world is there anywhere near the
religious bigotry and sheer hatred of other religions that exists in the
Muslim world.

Christians nearly everywhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds are usually
second-class citizens at best and terribly treated at worst.

The Taliban Islamic regime in Afghanistan blew up the unique Buddhist
sculptures in their country because they didn't want even a trace of a
non-monotheistic faith to survive in an Islamic country.

About a million non-Arab and non-Muslim men, women and children have been
slaughtered by the Islamic regime in Sudan.

Nigerian Christians are periodically murdered by Islamic mobs.

And regarding Jews, Andrew Sullivan writes in this week's Time: "The Arab
media run cartoons depicting Jews and the symbols of the Jewish faith with
imagery indistinguishable from that used in the Third Reich."

As for the riots and Islamic government protests, one question needs to be
posed to these people: Which casts Islam in a worse light -- political
cartoons depicting Muhammad, or Muslims who murder innocents around the
world in the name Allah and Islam?

Did any Jews riot when the Los Angeles Times published a cartoon of the
holiest site in Judaism, the Western Wall, with its stones reconfigured to
spell "hate"?

Did any Christians riot when museums displayed "***** Christ," a crucifix
submerged in artist Andres Serrano's urine?

What we have is a culture largely based on saving face and honor juxtaposed
with a Judeo-Christian Western culture largely based on saving liberty and
innocent life.

All of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, should pray that the better one
wins.
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