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Mollifying Muslims, and Muslifying Mollies ... Mark Steyn
Steyn Online ^ | 20 Sep 2010 | Mark Steyn

Posted on 09/20/2010 1:39:15 AM PDT by Rummyfan

While I've been talking about free speech in Copenhagen, several free speech issues arose in North America. I was asked about them both at the Sappho Award event and in various interviews, so here's a few thoughts for what they're worth:

Too many people in the free world have internalized Islam’s view of them. A couple of years ago, I visited Guantanamo and subsequently wrote that, if I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new copy of the Koran in each cell: To reassure incoming prisoners that the filthy infidels haven't touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Korans are hung from the walls in pristine, sterilized surgical masks. It's one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it's hard to see why it's in the interests of us infidels to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry. What does that degree of prostration before their prejudices tell them about us? It’s a problem that Muslims think we’re unclean. It’s a far worse problem that we go along with it.

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? As Diana West wrote, why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama's famous "teaching moments"? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where's the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones' First Amendment rights?

When someone destroys a bible, US government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.

So just to clarify the ground rules, if you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for "respect" and "sensitivity" toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it.

Maybe Pastor Jones doesn't have any First Amendment rights. Musing on Koran burning, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer argued:

[Oliver Wendell] Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout 'fire' in a crowded theater... Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?

This is a particularly obtuse remark even by the standards of contemporary American jurists. As I've said before, the fire-in-a-crowded-theatre shtick is the first refuge of the brain-dead. But it's worth noting the repellent modification Justice Breyer makes to Holmes' argument: If someone shouts fire in a gaslit Broadway theatre of 1893, people will panic. By definition, panic is an involuntary reaction. If someone threatens to burn a Koran, belligerent Muslims do not panic - they bully, they intimidate, they threaten, they burn and they kill. Those are conscious acts, at least if you take the view that Muslims are as fully human as the rest of us and therefore responsible for their choices. As my colleague Jonah Goldberg points out, Justice Breyer's remarks seem to assume that Muslims are not fully human.

More importantly, the logic of Breyer's halfwit intervention is to incentivize violence, and undermine law itself. What he seems to be telling the world is that Americans' constitutional rights will bend to intimidation. If Koran-burning rates a First Amendment exemption because Muslims are willing to kill over it, maybe Catholics should threaten to kill over the next gay-Jesus play, and Broadway could have its First Amendment rights reined in. Maybe the next time Janeane Garafolo goes on MSNBC and calls Obama's opponents racists, the Tea Partiers should rampage around town and NBC's free-speech rights would be withdrawn.

Meanwhile, in smaller ways, Islamic intimidation continues. One reason why I am skeptical that the Internet will prove the great beacon of liberty on our darkening planet is because most of the anonymous entities that make it happen are run by people marinated in jelly-spined political correctness. In Canada, an ISP called Bluehost knocked Marginalized Action Dinosaur off the air in response to a complaint by Asad Raza, a laughably litigious doctor in Brampton, Ontario. Had his name been Gordy McHoser, I doubt even the nancy boys at Bluehost would have given him the time of day. A similar fate briefly befell our old pal the Binksmeister at FreeMarkSteyn.com: In other words, a website set up to protest Islamic legal jihad was shut down by the same phenomenon. In America, The New York Times has already proposed giving "some government commission" control over Google’s search algorithm; the City of Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and the Constitution signed, is now so removed from the spirit of the First Amendment that it's demanding bloggers pay a $300 "privilege" license for expressing their opinions online. The statists grow ever more comfortable in discussing openly the government management of your computer. But, even if they don't formally take it over, look at the people who run publishing houses, movie studios, schools and universities, and ask yourself whether you really want to bet the future on the commitment to free speech of those who run ISPs. SteynOnline, for example, is already banned by the Internet gatekeepers from the computers at both Marriott Hotels and Toronto Airport.

But forget about notorious rightwing hatemongers like me. Look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She's the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up "Everybody Draws Mohammed" Day, and then, when she realized what she'd stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark's Mailbox to object. I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us:

You may have noticed that Molly Norris' comic is not in the paper this week. That's because there is no more Molly.

On the advice of the FBI, she's been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization's sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine's Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris' own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: "There is no more Molly"? That's all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:

Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

Who knows? Given his highly selective enthusiasms, you can hardly blame a third of Americans for figuring their president must be Muslim. In a way, that's the least pathetic explanation: The alternative is that he's just a craven squish. Which is an odd considering he is, supposedly, the most powerful man in the world.

Listen to what President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, The Seattle Weekly and Bluehost internet services are telling us about where we're headed. As I said in America Alone, multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that "in my country everyone is free to criticize the President", and the Soviet guy replies, "Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your President." Under one-way multiculturalism, the Muslim world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west's inheritance, and, likewise, the western world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals' loathing of their own.

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threatens it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ "bad cop". Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us "Islam is a religion of peace" then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.

While I was in Denmark, one of the usual Islamobozos lit up prematurely in a Copenhagen hotel. Not mine, I'm happy to say. He wound up burning only himself, but his targets were my comrades at the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. I wouldn't want to upset Justice Breyer by yelling "Fire!" over a smoldering jihadist, but one day even these idiots will get lucky. I didn't like the Danish Security Police presence at the Copenhagen conference, and I preferred being footloose and fancy-free when I was prowling the more menacing parts of Rosengard across the water in Malmö the following evening. No one should lose their name, their home, their life, their liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won't be there for you.

ELECTION NOTE I'm looking forward to getting back to the U.S. and weighing in on November's fun and frolics. But a quick word on Christine O'Donnell, the GOP Senate candidate from Delaware whom the politico-media establishment have decided is this season's easiest conservative target. If I understand their current plan to save the Dems, it rests on the proposition that America is about to be delivered into the care of a coven of witches who want to take away your right to masturbate. Two thoughts: First, any young woman (as she then was) willing to go on MTV, before a live audience, and attack masturbation certainly doesn't want for courage. As to her alleged dabbling with "witchcraft", so what? Several readers suggest Ms O'Donnell use Sinatra's "Witchcraft" as her campaign theme song. No, no, no. She should use the theme from "Bewitched": All she had to do was twitch her nose, and Mike Castle vanished. If it's a choice between Elizabeth Montgomery and Democrats cackling as they toss another trillion dollars into their bubbling cauldron, it's no contest.

Always loved the lyric to "Bewitched", which you never hear. If Ms O'Donnell wins, I'll be singing it on election night.

Thank you to everyone at the Danish Free Press Society who helped make my trip to Copenhagen such fun - especially Lars, Eva, Kit and Katrine. You can scroll down for the links to the audio of my acceptance speech plus various interviews. Afterwards, I nipped across the water to enjoy a livelier-than-usual Swedish election campaign, despite the best efforts of the dreary enforcers of its one-party media. As I always tell my Danish pals, Sweden is insane even by Scandinavian standards.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: marksteyn; muslims; steyn
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1 posted on 09/20/2010 1:39:18 AM PDT by Rummyfan
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To: Rummyfan

Steyn is the best.


2 posted on 09/20/2010 1:49:16 AM PDT by tet68 ( " We would not die in that man's company, that fears his fellowship to die with us...." Henry V.)
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To: Rummyfan

I’m listening to the audio of is talk at the Sappho Award mentioned here.

It’s awesome, as only Steyn can be:

“You’ll Have to Kill Us All” (Mark Steyn)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2591558/posts


3 posted on 09/20/2010 1:49:25 AM PDT by Enchante ("The great enemy of clear language is insincerity." -- George Orwell --)
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To: Rummyfan
It's not the Koran Stupid. It's You!
4 posted on 09/20/2010 1:52:21 AM PDT by expatguy (Support "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" - DONATE)
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To: Rummyfan
He's baaack!
And just in time for November.
5 posted on 09/20/2010 1:55:31 AM PDT by Politically Correct (A member of the rabble in good standing)
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To: tet68; Rummyfan; All

This talk I linked at #3 is fabulous!!!! (I’m listening to the audio right now)

Steyn is ON FIRE!!!

I highly recommend this talk. I’d love to find the transcript if there is one, but there’s nothing like hearing Steyn’s voice & accent saying his words.......

It took awhile to warm up but around 26:00 onward he is just on FIRE about the abominations of servile liberals bowing down to the depravities of Islamists.


6 posted on 09/20/2010 1:57:55 AM PDT by Enchante ("The great enemy of clear language is insincerity." -- George Orwell --)
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To: Rummyfan
BTT.....and thanks, Rummyfan!

The Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qa'eda have instructed their followers to 'use their laws against them' and it's apparently more and more the accepted case.....even among infidels. The Dhimmis are among us.
7 posted on 09/20/2010 2:00:10 AM PDT by BIGLOOK (Keelhaul Congress!)
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To: Rummyfan

bttt


8 posted on 09/20/2010 2:02:41 AM PDT by TexasGunRunner (Spay or neuter your pet coons; especially the bearded marxist variety!)
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To: Rummyfan

BTTT


9 posted on 09/20/2010 2:18:08 AM PDT by P.O.E. (Compact Theory)
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To: Rummyfan

Well, he calls it as it is. I am actually a bit surprised that the ditzy cartoonist who has now fled into hiding from the Muslims got so little coverage and so little support.

Bu as Steyn points out, we - or at any rate, the liberals among us - have internalized Islamic positions. Not only are the liberals physically afraid of what any criticism of Islam might bring, their “internal censors” won’t even let them think it.


10 posted on 09/20/2010 2:26:11 AM PDT by livius
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To: All
spread far and wide:

"It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threatens it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ "bad cop". Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us "Islam is a religion of peace" then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people."
11 posted on 09/20/2010 2:29:30 AM PDT by Enchante ("The great enemy of clear language is insincerity." -- George Orwell --)
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To: Rummyfan

This is probably the best article of the year.


12 posted on 09/20/2010 2:35:00 AM PDT by Tolsti2
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To: Tolsti2
Just in case you're also curious;

Theme Song Lyrics
Title: "Bewitched"
By: "Howard Greenfield" and "Jack Keller"

Bewitched, Bewitched,
You've got me in your spell.
Bewitched, Bewitched,
You know your craft so well.
Before I knew what I was doing,
I looked in your eyes.
That brand of woo you've been brewin',
Took me by surprise.

You witch, you witch,
One thing is for sure.
That stuff you pitch,
Just hasn't got a cure.
I never thought that I could be had,
But now I'm caught and I'm kinda glad to be Bewitched.

13 posted on 09/20/2010 2:54:46 AM PDT by WhoisAlanGreenspan?
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To: Rummyfan; JLS
Steyn ping!
The same people who tell us "Islam is a religion of peace" then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.

14 posted on 09/20/2010 2:55:54 AM PDT by jellybean (Bookmark http://altfreerepublic.freeforums.org/index.php for when FR is down)
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To: Rummyfan
If I understand their current plan to save the Dems, it rests on the proposition that America is about to be delivered into the care of a coven of witches who want to take away your right to masturbate.

That pretty much sums it up. It's almost so silly that you'd want to ignore it, except that far too large a segment of the population take the nonsense fed to them by the DNC far too seriously.

15 posted on 09/20/2010 3:01:03 AM PDT by eclecticEel (Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: 7/4/1776 - 3/21/2010)
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To: Rummyfan
The same people who tell us "Islam is a religion of peace" then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.
16 posted on 09/20/2010 3:06:18 AM PDT by abishai
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To: jellybean

Ooops. Oh well... Deserves to be repeated.


17 posted on 09/20/2010 3:07:29 AM PDT by abishai
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To: tet68

If anyone ever threatens to deport Steyn: He should be allowed to stay in the States, and the other 300 million of us should be deported!


18 posted on 09/20/2010 3:20:12 AM PDT by guitarist
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To: Rummyfan

bttt


19 posted on 09/20/2010 3:29:28 AM PDT by sphinx
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To: abishai
Deserves to be repeated.

Not only should it be repeated, it should be recited daily, along with the Pledge of Allegiance, by every school child in the country.

20 posted on 09/20/2010 4:14:31 AM PDT by jellybean (Bookmark http://altfreerepublic.freeforums.org/index.php for when FR is down)
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