Listen children to a story that was written long ago...

By ZIAD KHALAF, Associated Press Writer
17 minutes ago

SAMARRA, Iraq - A large explosion destroyed the golden dome of one of Iraq's most famous Shiite shrines Wednesday, spawning mass protests and triggering reprisal attacks against Sunni mosques. It was the third major attack against Shiite targets this week and threatened to enflame sectarian tensions.
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If you can only read one today, Friedman's column in the NYT or Roger Cohen's piece reprinted from the International Herald Tribune, go with Cohen.

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Coming as violence rages over the publication in Denmark last September of a dozen cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, the sentencing in Vienna of the British historian David Irving to three years in prison for the crime of Holocaust denial has created what might be called the perfect moral storm.

Perfect not least because, for Arabs and the entire Islamic world, it was precisely in the unjustifiable geographic displacement to the Middle East of Western and Jewish outrage over the Holocaust that lay the germ of much anger between Islam and the West. I refer, of course, to the outrage that fed the creation in 1948 of the state of Israel.

Never truly accepted by Arabs, even by those Arab states that have made a formal peace with it, the modern Jewish state has been seen from Cairo to Riyadh as embodying the perpetuation of Western colonial intrusion, the cementing of injustice through force, the contempt of the West for Muslims, and the double standards of Western societies.

It is precisely such supposed double standards that irk Moussa. Irving, a historian with a screw loose who never hurt a fly, questioned the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz - the very gas chambers that drove surviving Jews from Europe to the Middle East - and was sentenced to prison by an Austrian court.

Yet Flemming Rose, the culture editor of a Danish newspaper, chooses to impugn the foundations of a global faith, Islam, through the publication of cartoon images of the Prophet Muhammad - an act seen as sacrilegious by Muslims - and Europe moves to defend him in the name of freedom of speech as dozens are killed from Pakistan to Libya.

For many Muslims, who see themselves at some level as victims of a 61- year blowback from the great Nazi crime, or the innocent surrogates of Western shame, there could scarcely be a more succinct summation of the moral myopia of the West before the faith of 1.2 billion people.

Incensed by what he sees as Western insensitivity and hypocrisy, Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, wrote to me recently that:

"Muslims are convinced that the world, especially the West, shows no moral concern over their plight. The loss of innocent Muslims lives, whether in Iraq or Palestine, Afghanistan or Pakistan, does not stir the world. Nor has the West shown any real interest in supporting the development of Muslim societies. In short, the cartoons hurt Muslims badly because they add real insult to real injury." ...