Fouad Ajami, director of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University, on the cartoons crisis in the Grano lecture.

An excerpt from the Toronto Star transcript of his talk: (there's a podcast link on that page to the full lecture)

If you want to live in a liberal society, you have to be willing to be offended. And these people (Muslims) are not willing to be offended. They don't understand the nature of life in a modern society. They are in the West, as I always have said about them, but they are not of the West. ...

That dilemma for the Islamic world will endure. These cartoons are just a window on the unease of modern Islam -- on the inability of modern Muslims to live in their own lands, where they can't really make a living, but then when they take the faith abroad and try to manipulate it, they find themselves unable to live with others, and unable to accept the rules of the modern life. You are going to see more Salman Rushdie affairs. You are going to see more of these cartoons.

The city I grew up in, Beirut, has played a part. We watched the attack on the Danish consulate in Beirut. The people who assaulted the consulate came into a Christian area of Beirut, a city that is divided in the old-fashioned Ottoman way. There are Christian neighbourhoods and Muslim neighbourhoods. And the Lebanese know better than to go into a neighbourhood that is not their own. They know the rules of the road. But nevertheless, they stormed this consulate and they attacked a Mennonite church in east Beirut.

When the police rounded up some of these suspects, we learned something about them. The largest number of people who were rounded up were Syrians. The second largest were Palestinians. And the third, finally, bringing up the rear, were the Lebanese themselves.

Now, the Syrian regime orchestrating all this is hardly a pious regime, right? They themselves have had a terrible war with the Islamists in their midst. In 1982, the ruler, the father of this young ruler today, Assad himself, gunned down no fewer than 20,000 people in the city of Hamma, and they were principally Sunni Muslims. They were Muslim brothers who had risen against the "godless" regime of Assad.

So the spectacle of a tyrannical Syrian regime -- secular, really considered by the pious to be an un-Islamic, ungodly regime -- suddenly awakening to this great violation that befell the Islamic world is a scam. It's a scam, and people know that it's a scam.