Europe - What the Muhammad cartoons mean

It means it's time to awake to the danger within.

The statements of Hosni Mubarak and Tayyip Erdogan indicate how deep this cultural division is. At the same time many Europeans -- not most, but many -- are suddenly aware they stand on the edge. If they let Islamic clerics determine what Europeans can and cannot print in their own press through a process of intimidation and force, the Old Continent will have surrendered a large part of its independence and sovereignty. The holy grail of every agitator is to find an issue on which both sides are unalterably opposed. Radical Islam has found it the blasphemy of Mohammed and ironically gave those who would rouse the West a mirror issue of their own: the blasphemy of censorship and the extinction of freedom of speech.

Both sides now are in too deep to climb down without damage. For the European press the path to this confrontation has been imperceptible, absentminded and catastrophic. Yet all so terribly familiar. The old warnings come naturally to mind.

Britain surrendered long ago. She allowed Muslims to ban books such as "Animal Farm", cartoon characters such as Piglet, piggy banks from banks and ceramic pigs from Butchers windows. And by one vote almost passed a law that would have banned the cartoons now at the center of the row.

Leading the charge of submission to Islam is the BBC. Having hired the former editor in chief of al Jazeera to train their reporters, the BBC now whitewashes Muslim or Islam out of every terror report and refuses to even use the word terror or terrorists.

The BBC went so far as to produce a program, "The Power of Nightmares" that claimed al Qaeda was a myth, an illusion, created by the US to scare the world to do their bidding. That myth, that illusion, came to life six months later in London when Muslim terrorists murdered over 50 innnocent Britons.

Is it too late for Britain? I fear it is but time will tell. For as Belmont notes:

The fine, broad highway to Hell that is political correctness which has achieved the opposite of its intent: not the universal chorus of harmony but religious conflict at its most primitive level.

And do not suppose this is the end.
This is the beginning of the reckoning.
This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of the bitter cup,
which will be proffered to us year by year,
unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour,
we rise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.

But the words are only memories. The men who said them are gone and their heirs are not yet found.

You won't find them in Tony Blair, Jack Straw or the British media, that's for sure.
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