Many of those of us in religions that hold the Hebrew Bible as God’s word can understand that adherents to Islam would be angry at newspaper cartoons depicting or mocking the Prophet Mohammed. Exodus Chapter 20 verse four, after all, right there in the middle of the Ten Commandments, says, “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above…” So visitors to the great mosques of Islam see complex and beautiful geometric patterns in tiles and even rugs – but no images of Mohammed. The Web site of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in its introduction to Islamic Art, says, “Islam’s supposed prohibition against figural art is confined to the religious sphere.” The matter of mocking religious figures in art is particularly raw here in New York, where tax dollars were wrested from the public on the order of a federal judge who said that New Yorkers had a responsibility under the First Amendment to subsidize a display at the Brooklyn Museum that consisted of taking an image of Mary, festooning it with pornographical images from magazines and then smearing elephant dung on it.

For all that, though, there is something illuminating about the response to these cartoons. The response has clearly been engineered by Middle Eastern dictators desperate to distract from their own corruption, repressiveness, and backwardness. Yesterday in Lebanon, demonstrators set fire to the Danish consulate in Beirut, then rampaged through a Christian neighborhood. Saturday, rioters in Damascus torched the building housing the Danish, Norwegian, Chilean, and Swedish embassies. The actions amount to acts of war by Syria against Denmark, the defense of which is an American obligation under the North Atlantic Treaty. Denmark sent hundreds of troops to help America liberate Iraq. President Bush had it right in his statement over the weekend when he said, “We will hold Syria responsible for such violent demonstrations since they do not take place in that country without government knowledge and support.” The attacks make clear the enemy’s goal – to impose Islamic religious standards on the West, with violence the punishment for failure to comply – and the reason why the West must defend its freedom.