"Stop calling us violent and barbaric or we'll rip your tongue out!"
TigerHawk's blog today is absolutely, 100% dead-on. I seldom link to another blog, but this one is well-written, well-linked, well-backed article.

Infantilizing Muslim rage

Just about the entire world knows that that Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech on Tuesday condemning religious conversion by violence. The Muslim "street" did not respond until Friday, when the leaders of the Muslim religion called for their faithful to surge into the streets in an orgy of rage and violence. Not content only to burn Christian churches (neither of which follow the Catholic pope), they turned on themselves. Never in the history of Christianity has a pope been proven correct so quickly and demonstrably.

...The editors of The New York Times said this morning, to the eternal discredit of that once great paper, that "[t]he world listens carefully to the words of any pope. And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. He needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating that words can also heal."

This is obscene. Apart from its factual inaccuracy ... this is like blaming a beaten wife for provoking the bastard who throttles her. It is the leaders of prayers in the mosques of the Muslim world who call on their faithful to riot in the streets. It is they who sow pain and incite violence, and anybody unburdened by a loathing of Western civilization knows it.

[...]
They are not children, however much the cultural relativists who absolve the rioters and their sympathizers infantalize them. I condemn these people for making bad choices; liberals, such as the editors of the New York Times, refuse to condemn them because they believe that Muslims are incapable of choices. I may deplore the choices of these rioting Muslims, but the New York Times holds them in contempt, regarding them as nothing more than wild animals. Just as we all blame humans who antagonize an animal into a violent response, the New York Times blames Westerners who "sow pain," as if Muslims have the free will of a cornered wolf.

BINGO. That right there is the painful irony I should be screaming about from the rooftops. Here is the self-contradictory idiocy of NYT and MoveOn.org and the rest of the usual suspects. While these pundits argue that America is an "arrogant" nation and exhibits lack of cultural understanding and imperialistic hubris over Islamic people, these folks simultaneously argue that all Muslim brutality is ultimately a response to something the West does or says or thinks. In other words, while a white man is capable of instigating an affront to a Muslim, the Muslim in their view cannot, and never has, instigated an affront to a white man, but rather is only capable of acting in response to the former. The Muslim, like a child, like a wild animal, is free from responsibility, free from original sin - the poor little dear simply doesn't know any better! Does the NYT even think about how this sounds to a Muslim? If the pundits truly believe that Muslims hate the US because of our "arrogance", then why do the pundits themselves continuously insult and berate other cultures by speaking of brown people as helpless little children who are just acting out? The day the Left start recognizing them as adults, and holding them to the same standards, will be a day when the Muslims will have that much less "arrogance" to agitate them. Unfortunately, that day will never come.