Paging al-Delilah

My theory is the rage is in the beard. Shave him and he'll go meek and cuddly.

Go here and you'll see this guy gets around. Both Mark Steyn & Hitch note today that dhimmitude is nothing more than the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Hitch:

I have actually seen some of these demonstrations, most recently in Islamabad, and all I would do if I were a news editor is ask my camera team to take several steps back from the shot. We could then see a few dozen gesticulating men (very few women for some reason), their mustaches writhing as they scatter lighter fluid on a book or a flag or a hastily made effigy. Around them, a two-deep encirclement of camera crews. When the lights are turned off, the little gang disperses. And you may have noticed that the camera is always steady and in close-up on the flames, which it wouldn't be if there was a big, surging mob involved.

These people are a minority, in other words, yet we in the West are strangely eager to believe they're the whole story. Hitch notes this by asking where the Muslim protest is against the additional demolition of the Golden Mosque earlier this month --is that not a sacrilege?

The lives of Shiite Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Christians—to say nothing of atheists or secularists—are considered by Sunni militants to be of little or no account. And yet they accuse those who criticize them of bigotry! And many people are so anxious to pre-empt this accusation that they ventriloquize the reactions of Sunni mobs as if they were the vox populi, all the while muttering that we must take care not to offend such supersensitive people.

Then Mr. Steyn gives us his initial take on the grievance du jour, the Rushdie knighthood:

Given that his principal service to literature has been to introduce the word "fatwa" to the English language, one assumed that some characteristically cynical British civil servant had waved the knighthood through as a relatively cheap way of flipping the finger to the mullahs.

But no, it seems someone in Her Majesty's government thought this would be a sop to Muslims:

Can that really be true? In a typically incompetent response, Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, issued one of those obviously-we're-sorry-if-there's-been-a misunderstanding statements in which she managed to imply Mr. Rushdie had been honored as a representative of the Muslim community.

He's not. He's an ex-Muslim. He's a representative of the Muslim community's willingness to kill you for trying to leave the Muslim community.

But, locked into obsolescent multiculti identity-groupthink, Mrs. Beckett instinctively saw Mr. Rushdie as a member of a quaintly exotic minority rather than as a free-born individual.

That's a devastating indictment isn't it? They all look alike? Deep down, our entrenched elites don't think brown men are capable of doing other than this guy in the picture. How else to explain this?

One reader in England recalled one demonstration at which he asked a constable why the "Muslim community leaders" weren't arrested for incitement to murder. The officer told him to "[deleted] off, or I'll arrest you." Genuine "moderate Muslims" were cowed into silence, and pseudo-moderate Muslims triangulated with artful evasiveness.

It's bad enough we're selling our own culture out, but we're simultaneously making things more difficult for moderate Muslims. By the way, now seems like a good time to bring up this story from earlier this month --about CAIR representing basically nobody. Its membership has fallen 90% since 9/11 and it's down to about 1700 dues paying members. Yet who speaks for American Muslims according to our elite?