Mollifying mobs

Remember how a New York museum exhibited a sacrilegious depiction of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung and surrounded by pornogrpahic images? And how enraged Catholics took to the streets in an outburst of incendiary, lethal rioting, with mobs chanting “Death to the sacrilegious!”?

And how the Cardinal offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who killed the artist?

And how Hillary Clinton condemned the exhibit as repugant and antithetical to American values of religious tolerance and urged artistic sensitivity toward Catholic sanctities?

If you recall any of these developments other than the first, your memory is playing tricks on you. Yes, there was a museum exhibit featuring such a depiction of the Madonna as described above. But just about the only major voice in New York condemning the exhibit was that of then Mayor Rudy Guiliani.

Enraged Catholics didn’t storm the museum, and the Cardinal didn’t offer a reward for the artist’s death. And Hillary Clinton, then running for the Senate, didn’t exhort artists to be more attuned to Catholic religious sensitivities.

In fact, she closed ranks with the artsy-fartsy community in attacking Guiliani as a Philistine who favored censorship of art and was trying to force his religious values on others by shutting down an art museum.

In fact, Guiliani never proposed shutting down the museum and supported the artists’ right to express herself however and wherever she wished — just not her “right” to have her profane (also trite and sophomoric) “art work” promoted by a tax-subsidized institution.

Now here she is, Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, wagging a school-marmish finger of stern remonstrance at the obscure producers of a video trailer disrespecting Islam.

The brief trailer likely would never have seen the light of day had not Arab TV eagerly aired the thing, igniting Islam’s molotov cocktail hotheads who seem always to be on standby, ready to express their murderous “rage.”

The rule among high-minded progressives throughout the international community seems to be that Muslims are entitled to a pass allowing them to indulge themselves in violent, mob venting and to insist that in the event of a clash their religious tenets trump the First Amendment.