A leader in the religion of peace has a solution to the riots and protests over the cartoons that upset the extremist Muslims–execute the cartoonists:

Speaking from Beirut, Omar Bakri Mohammad, leader of the Islamist group al Muhajiroon which is banned in Britain, called for the execution of those involved with the cartoons.

“In Islam, God said, and the messenger Mohammad said, whoever insults a prophet, he must be punished and executed,” he told BBC radio by telephone.

But there are some voices of restraint and I hope they get their share of attention as well:

Moderate Moslem groups as well as Western leaders condemned the weekend violence and calls to arms and called for calm.

“With growing concern, we are witnessing the escalation in disturbing tensions…,” the prime ministers of Turkey and Spain said in the International Herald Tribune.

“We shall all be the losers if we fail to immediately defuse this situation, which can only leave a trail of mistrust and misunderstanding between both sides in its wake,” Tayyip Erdogan and Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said in the joint article.

H/T Michelle Malkin for the pointer to the Reuters article.

This post on a new blog, face of muhammed, articulates the concept Ry suggested to me the other day quite well:

A new non-political international movement is rising.

4000 terror attacks after 9/11, the world was still slumbering. But 12 innocent satirical drawings in a Danish newspaper, the kind of cartoons printed daily by the thousands in newspapers all over the world, have changed the geopolitical situation.

Suddenly, a new understanding is emerging across political differences.

In recent years, the world crisis between Islam and the non-Muslim world has been discussed in thousands of books, countless television debates and millions of articles across the globe. It did nothing but divide us. Even former western allies were divided, and a wave of anti-Americanism has swept even the free western societies.

Now ridiculous circumstances have changed all that. A sense of humour has changed what all the debating could not.

Read it all.

I suspect the text for most of this is in Danish, but the images speak their own language (some may not be safe for work).  The “asshole switch” has definitely been flipped.  Here are a couple of my favorites:

Thanks to Ry for the pointer.

The Times (U.K.) calls it Cartoon wars and the clash of civilisations and there are now over 1000 news stories about it.  Channel 4 (London) quotes a Muslim cleric that I particularly liked:

Influential Muslim cleric Youssef al-Qaradawi said: “The least we have to do is boycott those who offended us by not buying their products.

“We thought it was only Denmark and Norway … but several European countries and newspapers started reprinting these extremely offending pictures.”

In the spirit of service to their customers I think all freedom loving media outlets should show the cartoons and continue the desensitization therapy.  Let the Muslims do their least to all of us.

Sometimes people do things which cause their greatest fear to be realized.  For example; a man that is extremely afraid their wife will leave them will forbid them to work outside the home, to visit relatives, and in general isolate them from all other people.  This forced isolation may well be the reason their spouse does leave them.  And it could be the Arabs and perhaps Muslims in general are working as similar sort of angle.  Take a look at these cartoons from Arab media.  Their view of the world is that the Jews are out to get them.  This frame of mind would explain why many of them want to “wipe Israel off the map” and kill all Jews.  It appears to me they are at risk of having their greatest fear realized because of their own actions.

One way people with abnormal fears or sensitivities can overcome their problem is by gradually being exposed to more and more of whatever it is that causes the adverse reaction.  For example, someone with a fear of water/drowning could put their feet in a children’s wading pool and become comfortable with that before moving on to deeper and deeper water.  It appears some European newspapers are doing some desensitizing therapy of their own on the Muslim extremists that have difficulty with images of Muhammad:

Newspapers in France and Germany were accused of throwing oil on the fire on Wednesday after they reprinted controversial Danish caricatures of the prophet Muhammad that have sparked unrest in the Muslim world.

The Dutch are helping too:

Geert Wilders, the rightwing Dutch politician whose campaign against radical Islam led to death threats that forced him into hiding, on Wednesday published the controversial cartoons on his website, Dutch media reported.

The German editor had a particularly insightful question:

Roger Köppel, editor of Die Welt, defended his decision to publish the drawing alongside an editorial asking, “How much humour can Muhammad’s religion take?”

Of course all these contributions to the desensitization therapy could be interpreted as “turning on the asshole switch” (as Ry put it to me at lunch today) but the Muslim extremists shouldn’t think of it in that way. Never mind that for the therapy to work the person receiving the therapy has to want to change.  And that they need to stay mostly within their comfort zone as the stimulus is increased.  But as an enlightened people they should realize that all these people are just trying to help them overcome their problems and adapt to the differences from the usual protocol.