Overstated?
Reader comment on item: [Nepal and France:] Two Opposite Responses to Terrorism

Submitted by bucephalus (United States), Sep 14, 2004 at 18:04

Where is the appeasement in receiving a demand from terrorists, and not meeting the demand? The terrorists who took the French journalists hostage in Iraq were demanding that the French law on headscarf be repealed. Did the French do that? No. The French government simply used all its influence, where ever it exert it, to get the hostages. To call that appeasement and 'dhimmitude' seems rather overstated.

Also, did Daniel Pipes really want to make the contrast that he did? France the appeaser, and Nepal the non-appeaser?

The only thing the Nepalese reaction showed was that in most of the Third World, people behave in tribalistic ways. Nepalese Muslims had absolutely nothing to do with the death of the 12 Nepalis in Iraq at the hands of Arab Muslims, but in the tribalistic logic so common in ethnic flareups, killing Nepalese Muslims was reckoned just retribution. Hindus and Muslims do that sort of tribalistic tit-for-that all the time in the rest of South Asia. The Nepalis just showed themselves to be solidly a part of South Asia.

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