Muslim rage racket in trouble after Paris mass murders

Amir Taheri:

Clearly shaken by the wave of sympathy for France in the wake of the Jan. 7 terror attacks in Paris, Muslim officials and opinion leaders are still uncertain how to respond.

The attack on Charlie Hebdo and its aftermath has changed some of the established “givens” of a confrontation between Western democracies and self-styled leaders of the Ummah of Islam.

In the classical model of that confrontation, Islamic leaders seize upon any move by the West that looks likely to anger “the Muslims masses” as an excuse for a series of cliché-like operations: the burning of American and Israeli flags, the chanting of anti-US slogans, setting fire to effigies of Western leaders, attacking European and US consulates and companies, and lengthy anti-West speeches at Friday Prayer gatherings.

Yet that model required (among other things) tacit support from Muslim governments and elites, whether via forked-tongued statements or (even better) outright silence. This time, things are not quite the same.

To start with, the Paris attacks were organized and carried out by a branch of al Qaeda. Thus, it’s hard to see this as Muslims expressing their “grievances.”

It would also mean giving kudos to a jihadism that, given the chance, would happily cut the throats of Saudi, Egyptian, Turkish, Iranian and Pakistani leaders.

Also different is that many within the “world of Islam” have chosen not to play the game by the old rules.

No fewer than 40 of the 57 member nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference had representatives at the massive Paris march.

Among them was the king of Jordan, who claims descent from the Prophet, the prime minister of Turkey under an Islamist government, a senior member of the Saudi royal family and the president of the Palestinian Authority.

And inside the “Muslim world” strong voices condemned the attacks. Across the media in the Middle East and Asia, almost no one dared to condone them.

Even “religious authorities,” such as those in Cairo’s Al-Azhar and Najaf in Iraq, were careful to condemn terrorism while expressing “pain and hurt” over Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet.

Yet some were still tempted to exploit the episode as another sequence in the “Islam vs. the West” saga.
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There were several Muslim conspiracy theories including one espoused by the leader of Turkey.  There seems to be a cottage industry in making up stories to explain mass murder by Islamic religious bigots.  But, the revulsion to this attack seem to overwhelm much of the raqge industry.