Karachi has had bloody guerrilla campaigns, until recently directed by a London-based politician, calling on the refugee progeny from the 1947 bloody Partition against “native” Punjabis, Pathans, and Sindhis. Evangelism by Saudi Wahabism and Iranian state terrorism has aggravated Pakistan’s intra-Moslem Sunni-Shi’a conflicts as well as continued persecution of so-called heretical Islamic sects.

It was child’s play, therefore, for European-based Moslem leaders, months after they couldn’t stir Danish social conflict to increase their political power, to spread venom through the Moslem world. The supposed violation of Islam’s prohibitions on reproduction of any godhead was the impetus for disruptions sweeping the Moslem world. But in reality the Danish imams used the radical Islamic network to exploit always existing misery. Again we have the spectacle of psychotic misfits in Western society rather than Moslems in their home countries as the sparkplugs, often allied with looting criminal street gangs. [Even in more sophisticated Beirut Danish Embassy sacking was an excuse to steal from neighboring offices.]

Unfortunately, with the 24-hour CNN and Al Jazeera megaphone and their largely uninformed commentators, troublemakers are able to present the violence as motivated by legitimate religious sanctions. Arcane debates about freedom of expression become tangled in the local web of poverty and social oppression. It’s a world of which the average Western journalist [much less his reader and listener] has only the slightest inkling.

Exploitation of children, oppression of women, child marriage, pedophilia, incest, “honor killings”, family and tribal feuding, grinding poverty, everyday occurrences in these societies, go largely unreported and unacknowledged. But because of Western oriented worldwide news reporting, every such episode in the West is a major news story dispersed to the semi-literate in these countries. Furthermore, their hypocritical elite are ready to use these Western episodes to distract attention from much their own more frequent social abuses.

What is to be done? First of all, Western policymakers must not make special concessions to one religion — that is, Islam — whatever its demands and peculiar prohibitions. Liberty, including freedom of expression, is the essence of Western civilization, a model for the oppressed in the rest of the world. Why do the populations of these countries make every effort to immigrate, were that not true? Because of economic privation and opportunities for jobs? Yes, but surely those are part and parcel of the Western society the Islamic radicals, many of them resident in the West, denounce as they try to exploit it. Wahabism floats on a sea of petrodollars!

Secondly, the West [and the U.S. which suffered the first assault on 9/11] must make every effort to defend itself. That includes definition of what Islamic radicals can and cannot do living in our societies, including their rights of assembly, protest, and petition. That London police permitted demonstrators to carry signs calling for murder of their opponents is inexcusable. It calls up the old Oliver Wendell Holmes’ axiom: free speech does not permit crying “fire” in a crowded theater which would cause panic and death.

And lastly, the West — and most particularly the U.S. — must go on the propaganda offensive. Tolerance has never been a hallmark of Islamic societies whatever recent apologetics. But there is a tradition among Moslems, sometimes even dominant for brief periods in their history, where it has flowered. Just as sometimes in the Christian past intolerance and repression have been the norm, the world and the more than a billion Moslems must move on. Persuading the elite in these societies through education and example to follow that path has to be an essential part of what increasingly is now obvious, the still longer war against organized terror in store.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.