Posted on 09/03/2020 6:44:35 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
They’ve done it again: as the trial of some of those who plotted the Charlie Hebdo jihad massacre begins in France, Charlie Hebdo has republished some of the Muhammad cartoons over which so many people are so enraged. And as always, numerous people are saying that mocking Muhammad is “disrespectful” to Muslims, it’s needlessly “poking the bear,” and the like.
How far we have fallen. Back in 1989, when the Islamic Republic of Iran called for his death for insulting Islam, Salman Rushdie became an international hero of free speech. Later defenders of this fundamental freedom, however, have not fared as well, as The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies) shows.
In Rushdie’s day, Christopher Hitchens noted, “We risk a great deal by ceding even an inch of ground to the book-burners and murderers.” Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz denounced the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death as “intellectual terrorism”—although several years later, under pressure himself from Islamic hardliners (who ultimately stabbed and seriously injured him), he denounced Rushdie’s book as “insulting” to Islam, but he still condemned the death sentence.
Novelist Norman Mailer declared his willingness to die for the freedom of speech, saying of Rushdie: “It is our duty to form ranks behind him, and our duty to state to the world that if he is ever assassinated, it will become our obligation to stand in his place. If he is ever killed for a folly, we must be killed for the same folly.”
That may have been the high-water mark of pop culture support for the freedom of speech.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
People forget how hot this area was in the 80’s.
One of my buddies, just returning off of a submarine spec op literally was walking on the pier going home with his sea bag and got shanghaied by another skipper and got sent to the Med due to a terrorist bombing.
...the list would go on forever... there is a site that does a world count daily.. and it’s just overwhelming the numbers of murders committed by jihadis ... I only spent 4 yrs in Iraq and in that short amount of time 17 guys I knew and severed with were killed. ...and I wonder why ...
“Never forget what these Islamist creeps did at Bataclan.”
And Beslan.
L
Thank you for your service.
...no worries — had to do something with all that Army training!
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