Mohammed's Looney Toons: the recent cartoon controversy illuminates Muslim intolerance for debate and the danger of a growing Islamic population in the West.

Flemming Rose, an editor at Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, sure can pick a fight. Rose is the man who published the dirty dozen cartoons of Mohammed, one of them featuring his turban shaped like a bomb, that sent Muslims everywhere into February's fine fury.

The gibbering over whether they should have been published aside, the episode is an unnerving commentary on European immigration policies. But perhaps Western political and cultural elites, who subverted Christianity and its culture with one hand and promoted its hostile and historic nemesis with the other, have finally learned something.

In their effort to erase the old moral order, they may have created a bigger problem than they bargained for. In their cities. In their towns. In their streets. It is rising Islam.

The Rage

Rose worries about Islam and its dampening effect on the vigorous exchange of ideas. He published the unflattering cartoons depicting Mohammed in September, supposedly because Danish artists were terrified of illustrating a children's biography of Mohammed. A Norwegian publication reprinted them, and the smoldering coal of Muslim malice toward everything Western burst into a global wildfire.

A dozen people died in Afghanistan, and five more died in Pakistan. Radical Muslims not only boycotted Danish products, but also attacked the Danish embassy in Tehran with Molotov cocktails, attacked Danish consulates, and rioted in Pakistan. An Iranian newspaper solicited mocking cartoons about the Holocaust. In Kabul, Afghanistan, the Washington Post reported, protestors attacked United Nations vehicles and property and shouted such slogans as "down with the USA," "down with Jews," "down with the Christians!" and "long live Islam!"

Raging street radicals attacked a U.S. consulate in Indonesia and American military bases in Afghanistan. In the United States, where nothing happened because we are not besieged by radical Muslim immigrants, some newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, published the cartoons. Muslims shook their fists outside the Inquirer when it published them.

Surprisingly, major European capitals are not ablaze, given that disgruntled Muslims recently torched part of Paris and that the Koran supposedly forbids graven images of Islam's prophets. Some observers say it does; others aver that Islamic art and history is rife with them. Whatever the case, observers rightly note that militant imams, using the Internet and cell phones, abetted the bedlam.

What It Means

Mohammedanism is again unmasked. Provocateurs certainly egged the masses on, but the masses acted, ultimately, on their own. If this many Muslims are so handily twiddled into a feral rage, Europe's and America's immigration policies are suicidal. Far too many Muslims are inclined to answer any slight, real or imagined, with violence, mayhem, and murder--or threats to commit them. Islam is organically intolerant of dissent. The riots and killings over the cartoons prove the incapacity for large numbers of Muslims to assimilate into Western society.

For anyone who understands the effects of language, culture, and religion on nationhood, the immigrationist proposition that Muslims are interchangeable with Danes or Americans has always been self-evidently absurd. Being an American or a Dane or a Briton for that matter, which usually makes one a Christian at least culturally and temperamentally, means you don't toss Molotov cocktails at embassies in one country because you don't like a cartoon published in another. Christian clerics in New York and Los Angeles don't issue death warrants for uppity novelists or murder blasphemous movie producers. Real Christians don't murder in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, although they are often tricked into war for the spreading of "democracy."

A recent case in point: the outrage (and restraint) of Polish Catholics over the sacrilegious depiction of the sacred Black Madonna and Child icon by a pop-culture magazine. According to Polish tradition, the famous Black Madonna was painted by St. Luke the Evangelist and is credited with many miraculous healings and battlefield victories over the centuries. On February 9, 2006, the Polish magazine Machina published a cover photograph of the revered icon, but with the Blessed Virgin's face replaced by that of the infamously obscene and blasphemous pop diva Madonna. One of the singer's children was featured in the place of the infant Jesus Christ.

The Paulinian monks of Czestochowa, the custodians of the icon, were justifiably incensed. "We are shocked to see, yet again, the miraculous icon of the mother of God used in a profanatory way for advertising and business purposes," they said in a press release. Millions of Poles and Catholics worldwide were likewise angered and disgusted by this sacrilege. But note, there were no murderous rampages, bombings, shootings, or death threats.

The New Rules

Of course, Muslims do not speak or act at the inopportune moment--i.e., when they are a small minority. They know strength lies in numbers. Muslims obey the laws of their host countries, and live peacefully until their growing numbers confer political power and the "right" to demand change.

Which takes the story back to Britain. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark and explains why publishing the cartoons was so perilous. When they were few, the Muslims kept quiet. But unrestricted immigration and high birth rates brought the Muslim onslaught. They conquered whole sections of cities. They built mosques. They formed schools. Only then did they attack the traditional political liberties these feeble Europeans took for granted. Not least among those liberties were the rights to publish newspapers, magazines, and books--or create sculptures and paintings--free of government censorship. The Muslims demanded and received abject deference to their religious sensibilities with laws, for instance, against inciting "racial and religious hatred"--forbidding speeches and publications critical of Islam.

Europeans even apologize for their history and culture. In Britain, prison guards may no longer wear pins bearing the cross of St. George, which adorns the British flag, because the Crusaders wore the "racist" symbol, which "offends" Muslim convicts. This invites the question of why so many Muslims land in prison, but in any event Burger King, for a while anyway, stopped serving ice cream cones when a Muslim "activist" complained about the swirl on the lid. It resembled "Allah" in Arabic script.

On Fox News, the man who helped spread the cartoons in the Middle East, Abu Laban, the figurehead of the Islamic Society of Denmark, told a reporter he expected Europeans "within the concept of dynamism of liberalism to create ... a new set of rules."

"So you want a new set of rules for the way Western Europe lives?" the reporter asked. "Yes," Laban replied.

Those rules are Sharia, the Muslim law, which the political elites and left-wing multiculturalists, who welcomed the Muslim horde in the name of tolerance, would find intolerant and intolerable. In Muslim Europe, blasphemous cartoons will be the least of the leftist elite's problems. It will be more concerned about the homosexuals who are beheaded and the cheeky feminists who are raped and put into their rightful place--"rightful," that is, in the eyes of the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him. Forgive the sarcasm, but no honest observer expects a different result. The elites richly deserve what they get, but average Europeans don't, and neither do average Americans.

Good art often reveals truth, and these cartoons did exactly that in the reaction they provoked. If the West doesn't want to live under Laban's "new rules," the immigration must stop. That requires capsizing the anti-Christian political and cultural elites on both continents. If the citizens of the West don't do it to protect themselves, the Muslims will do it to finish what they started--and we will pay the price.