Opinion: Solidarity with Europe

In appealing for Muslims to be reasonable, European newspapers have presumed that religious sensibility can be made submissive to reason. This presumption is eminently true, while also being eminently Western.

Critiquing Western rationalism in Andre Malraux's La Tentation de l'Occident, Ling paradoxically notes: "I know not how to imagine, without trouble, these meditations in which all the intensity of love is concentrated upon a tortured body" - the body of Jesus Christ. Ling's comment is paradoxical because while critiquing Western rationalism in favor of Eastern sensibility, he cannot make sense of Western religious sensibilities. Indeed, Christianity is senseless unless accounted for through reason, in words. When Jesus tells us he is "Logos," he makes this explicit.

We might then ask this of Muslims who are moved to burn our European embassies: are your religious sensibilities incompatible with reason? Are Muslims capable of being reasonable? If the answer is yes, then European newspapers did not elicit the anger of Muslim religious sensibility, but merely roused - not for the first time - the vicious resentment that continues to be a hallmark of the "Arab street." Resentment parading in the mask of religious sentiment is not alien to Europe; it is a disease of the human soul as inherent in Man as hubris or tyranny.

Poland's Prime Minister has apologized to Muslims and said that he "shares the feelings of those whose feelings have been hurt." This is a disgrace. The Prime Minister has publicly empathized with a mob that is intent upon vanquishing the civilized balance between reason and revelation in favor of a murderous resentment veiled under the cloak of Muslim religious sensibility. As if to underline the problem, Polish police recently raided and shut down an art gallery in Kraków, accusing the artists of "offending religious sensibilities."

Thus the government of Poland not only endangers freedom of speech domestically, but goes so far as to embrace Muslim mobs who burn our European embassies and murder European artists, such as Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam. In light of all of this, Defense Minister Radek Sikorski, a gentleman and scholar who understands what is happening in the world, should protest the Prime Minister's words and argue for courage in the face of adversity, both at home and abroad.

Peter S Rieth, Zbigniew Raszewski Theatrical Institute