The butterfly effect and Islam

Brendan Bernhard:

There’s a popular scientific theory known as “the butterfly effect,” in which a small insect beating its wings in one corner of the world can start a chain reaction that leads to a hurricane in another. Like bird flu, the butterfly effect appears to have transmuted and taken up residence among humans. Radical Islamists seem particularly susceptible to the virus, as demonstrated by the global controversy over the Danish cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The butterfly effect, Islamist-style, goes like this: An imam flaps the sleeves of his gown in Copenhagen, and five months later angry mobs torch Scandinavian embassies in Damascus and Beirut.

Most of the cartoons, originally published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, were mild to the point of timidity. But two caused particular “outrage” among those who like to take their rage outside and get it on CNN as quickly as possible. One showed Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a ticking bomb, and the other depicted him at the gates of Paradise, frantically informing a freshly arrived batch of suicide bombers that they had “run out of virgins.”

Jyllands-Posten originally commissioned the cartoons to combat Western self-censorship — a noble goal. Its editor (now on a “leave of absence” and, one suspects, a lot of tranquilizers as well) learned that a Dane writing a children’s book about the life of the Prophet could find no one in Denmark willing to illustrate it, almost certainly because every available artist was afraid of being killed if he or she did. It is a well-known fact that most Muslim countries ban pictures of the Prophet in any form, but Denmark is not a Muslim country. At least not yet.

If Danes were once afraid of what The New York Times terms “the general Muslim prohibition” on images of the Prophet, they must be downright terrified now. (The cartoonists, like an increasing number of Europeans who get on the wrong side of Islamists, are in hiding.) Given the furor, is it fair to ask whether, in the future, Danes should also be afraid of “the general Muslim prohibition” on eating, drinking and smoking during daylight hours in the month of Ramadan? Or on pork? Or on baring long, lovely legs during short, precious summers? Will these ex-Vikings eventually be required to refer to Muhammad not only as “the Prophet” Muhammad, but to add “peace be upon him” whenever they mention his name?

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