Good questions for our “leaders”

Fouad Ajami (senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution) looks at a vexing question:Why is the Muslim world so easily offended?

It is never hard to assemble a crowd of young protesters in the teeming cities of the Muslim world. American embassies and consulates are magnets for the disgruntled. It is inside those fortresses, the gullible believe, that rulers are made and unmade. Yet these same diplomatic outposts dispense coveted visas and a way out to the possibilities of the Western world. The young men who turned up at the U.S. Embassies this week came out of this deadly mix of attraction to American power and resentment of it. The attack in Benghazi, Libya, that took the lives of four American diplomats, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, appeared to be premeditated and unconnected to the film protests.

The ambivalence toward modernity that torments Muslims is unlikely to abate. The temptations of the West have alienated a younger generation from its elders. Men and women insist that they revere the faith as they seek to break out of its restrictions. Freedom of speech, granting license and protection to the irreverent, is cherished, protected and canonical in the Western tradition. Now Muslims who quarrel with offensive art are using their newfound freedoms to lash out against it.

Ah, except they are not willing to allow others their newfound freedoms, nor do they understand how they work. The United States is in a perfect position to enlighten these genuinely backward-thinking people by sticking to its founding principles — which are shown to have been centuries ahead of their time.

And, as principles go, that pesky First Amendment didn’t get to be first for nothing. It was and is so far ahead of its time that even our closest friends and allies still balk. Freedom of speech, it seems, is unique to the United States. And if the attitude of this White House is any indication, it is endangered even here.

Matt Welch reminded me of this problem, and asks another great question — What’s So Hard About Saying, “In the United States, we are not in the business of approving these messages”?

…the First Amendment, no matter how embattled, protects a range of expression unthinkable even in Western Europe. Because of that unique position, and because the U.S. seems doomed to play an outsized diplomatic and military role in the tumultuous Muslim world, it behooves the State Department to constantly explain the vast differences between state-sanctioned and legally protected speech in the so-called Land of the Free. If the U.S. government really was in the business of “firmly reject[ing]” private free-speech acts that “hurt the religious beliefs of others” there would be no time left over for doing anything else.

It’s really not that hard. The values in that film (or “film”) are not our values; our government respects religion, religious expression, and religious pluralism (including and especially that of Muslims, even in the wake of murderous Muslim-led attacks on American soil); and we are not in the business of approving or (for the most part) regulating the private speech of our citizens. To the extent that that message is not sufficient for rioters, the problem is theirs.

Some liberal Tweeters this morning are pointing out that, hey, the Bush administration condemned the Mohammed cartoons, too!, but this mostly goes to illustrate how bipartisan cravenness can be. We know that this issue will keep coming up; maybe it’s about time the American government, and the rest of us, develop a more American response.

That the leadership of this once proud country is apologizing for our freedom when it ought to be inspiring other countries by our example is very worrisome.

If other countries are in fact so hopelessly mired in backwardness that we cannot engage them without apologizing, that is a good argument for simply not engaging them. Except I think we can engage them. It’s just that it might take a little courage. They need to understand that in our country, they have the right to conduct angry demonstrations, to insult our religious beliefs (or lack thereof), to burn our flag, to hurl the foulest of insults, but that we are free to do the same thing. They don’t seem to get that freedom is a two way street.

Why is there no leadership? I ask this question as someone who deeply distrusts leaders of all stripes, but it seems to me that if we must elect leaders (which we must), that they have a responsibility to live up to the label. There is a reason so many people would sell their souls to get to this country, and that is freedom that we take for granted. And instead of trying to share that with the world and explain why it is so great, our leaders are perfectly content to throw it under the bus.

They ought to be ashamed, but they are shameless. They are not leaders; they are craven, cowardly followers, and they want to make us like them.