Pajamaline:

We congratulate our friend Michelle Malkin who will receive the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute’s Woman of the Year Award on Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

Unless I’ve just been sleeping through it, Malkin hasn’t mentioned this. One former winner: Dr. Laura.

There is a middle ground, as I’ve referred to, between completely selling out free speech and poking a hornet’s nest with a stick. Malkin is doing the latter - but Europe appears to be doing the former. I’m not sure which is worse.

The middle ground lies in exploring the issues behind these riots. This is something that neither side of the blogosphere seems very interested in right now. Quite unsurprisingly, Juan Cole is an exception.

Muslim touchiness about Western insults to the prophet Mohammed must be understood in historical context. Most Muslim societies have spent the past two centuries either under European rule or heavy European influence, and most colonial masters and their helpmeets among the missionaries were not shy about letting local people know exactly how barbaric they thought the Muslim faith was. The colonized still smart from the notorious signs outside European clubs in the colonial era, such as the one in Calcutta that said, “Dogs and Indians not allowed.”

Shorter Malkin:

No violence in this instance, which means that Catholics have never been violent in response to blasphemers. QED.

But I’ll say it again: It’s not just about the cartoons. One could spend posts and posts unravelling the sociological causes behind this outbreak of violence. Malkin chooses to eschew this, spending posts and posts saying essentially the same thing. (Which, naturally, has led me to do the same.)

The clues are all there in her coverage: The delay between the cartoons’ original publication and the reaction, the countless instances of Muhammed images in Muslim publications, the calls for boycotts of other Scandinavian countries - it’s clear that the rioters were waiting for an excuse…but the conclusion we draw from that should be only that these riots are a sign of how the West is seen in Muslim circles.

The riots are less an indictment of overreacting Muslims than a warning for the oblivious West. And to continue to beat the “Us vs. Them” drum is the epitome of obliviousness.