Posted on 05/05/2015 6:55:35 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Terrorists assaulted a “Mohammed cartoon” event in Texas sponsored by activist Pamela Geller, and the response has been, in part, soul-searching over what’s wrong with Pamela Geller.
Geller is an attention-hungry provocateur who will never be mistaken for Bernard Lewis, the venerable scholar of Islam. Her Texas gathering to award a cash prize for the best cartoon of Mohammed — depictions of whom are considered offensive by many Muslims — was deliberately offensive, but so what?
Two armed Muslim men showed up intending to kill the participants, and were only thwarted when they were shot dead by a police officer who was part of the elaborate security arrangements.
Absent the security, we might have had a Charlie Hebdo–style massacre on these shores, in Garland, Texas, no less, a suburb of Dallas. (The world would be a safer and better place if the forces of civilization everywhere were as well-prepared and well-armed as they are in Texas.)
That horrifying prospect didn’t stop CNN from interrogating Geller the morning after the attack about her views of Islam and her decision to have as the keynote speaker for her event the anti-Islam Dutch politician Geert Wilders (who has to live under 24-hour protection). The implicit assumption was that Geller and her cohorts were as much of a problem as the fanatics who planned to censor them at the barrel of a gun.
Today, criticism of Islam is at the vanguard of the fight for free speech, since it is susceptible to attack and intimidation by jihadists and calls for self-censorship by the politically correct.
Geller refers to her meeting as a free-speech event while her critics prefer to call it an anti-Islam event. They are really one and the same. In today’s circumstances, criticism of Islam is at the vanguard of the fight for free speech, since it is susceptible to attack and intimidation by jihadists and calls for self-censorship by the politically correct.
“Yes, but . . . ” defenses of Geller don’t cut it. She had a perfect right to do what she did, and it’s a condemnation of her enemies — and confirmation of her basic point about radical Islam — that the act of drawing and talking elicited a violent response.
If cartoons of Mohammed may seem a low, petty form of speech, they are only the fault line in a deeper clash of civilizations. A swath of the Muslim world doesn’t just want to ban depictions of Mohammed, but any speech critical of Islam.
There was much tsk-tsking after the Charlie Hebdo attack about how France had made itself vulnerable to domestic terrorism because it has failed to assimilate Muslim immigrants. The critique carried a whiff of self-congratulation about how much better the U.S. is as a melting pot, and so it is.
Yet two Phoenix roommates were still prepared to commit mass murder to keep people from drawing images they don’t like. One of them, an American convert to Islam named Elton Simpson, had been convicted of lying to the FBI about discussions about traveling to Somalia, allegedly to engage in terrorism. He evidently took inspiration from ISIS calls to attack the Garland, Texas, event, in another sign that the poisonous ideology of radical Islam knows no borders.
It will ever be thus until all of Islam accepts the premises of a free society, as have other major world religions. The day there can be the Muslim equivalent of the play The Book of Mormon without the writers, actors, and audience members fearing for their lives will be the day that Islam is reformed. Then, and only then, will mockery of Islam by the likes of Pamela Geller and her ilk be a tasteless irrelevance, rather a statement from atop the ramparts of free speech.
Yes, there is such a thing as self-restraint and consideration of the sensibilities of others, but it shouldn’t be the self-restraint of fear. Pamela Geller is a bomb-thrower, but only a metaphorical, not a literal, one. That’s the difference between her and her enemies — and between civilization and barbarism.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
I have always believed this — The peacefulness of a Muslim is inversely proportional to how devout and seriously he takes the Koran and the Hadiths.
The more seriously one studies and obeys the Koran and Hadiths, the more violent one becomes.
The less seriously and the more ignorant a Muslim is about the Koran and the Hadiths, the more peaceful he is likely to be.
That’s the truth! NRO showed a real “profile in courage” when they dismissed John Derbyshire.
Insult is the least of what i would like to do. But i would settle for them leaving the US of A. Why are they here???
It is not the disciples of islime who are at fault; it is the pseudo-religion itself. THAT is why it must be exterminated.
But since you can't exterminate an idea, the best we can do is wipe out its adherents.
Yes, but to be fair, they exercised their privilege. It works in the same way as posting guidelines on this forum.
RE: It is not the disciples of islime who are at fault; it is the pseudo-religion itself.
YOU GOT IT.
Not surprisingly, pResident Obama disagrees with most Americans, the Bill of Rights and a tradition of nearly two hundred fifty years of open, robust and free political expression here in the “first and best hope for mankind”.
We would’t want to risk hurting the feelings of the `religion of peace,’ such delicate little flowers.
That’s true and I don’t dispute it, but they were cowards for firing him merely for stating facts and statistics and drawing a few reasonable deductions from those statistics. They wouldn’t have done it if he had been black.
Well now that we know what brings them out of the woodwork maybe its time for a little deer baiting. Schedule a bunch of cartoon contests in every city and then mount deer stands In the trees and sell Muslim tags. :-)
Sharia allows no depiction of the human form. It is not just that these were cartoons--and animation is a form of art depicting humans. Were Picasso's abstract representations so far from being "cartoonish"? And remember, THERE ARE NO SISTINE CHAPELS IN ISLAM! I am just amazed that they haven't blown up a major Western museum like they have the Buddhist religious statues. Or made an attempt to attack the Vatican.
If we allow this, and the acceptance of Sharia into America as it is now seeping in through family courts in sympathetic jurisdictions, what will it be next?
Why no complaints about how homosexuals and women are treated under Sharia? Will they expect American women to wear a scarf and not drive? Will they want four wives? Will they destroy the art at the Met? Has anyone noticed that the guys who want to chop people's heads off are using the same techniques dictated by Islamic writings for the removal of infidels?
When will America wake-up? We call them "radical" Muslims. In Islam, they are the true followers. And they don't like us. And even it is only 1% of the Muslim population of the world, it's still 1,600,000 people who want us dead and our nation and Western culture gone.
EXACTLY!!!
SHAMEFULL ATTACKS BY THE DIMMIT MEDIA TO PAMELA GELLER AND GERT WILDERS
The American Dimmit media has accepted total submission to the mandates of the Islamic terrorists.
In January 17,2015, and in the same public school center, there was a “Stand with the Prophet” rally by Muslims, a provocative pro-Shariah law event, by supporters Al-Qaida and Isis organized by one of the terrorists implicate in the bombing of the garage of the NY World Trade Center in 1993.
I wonder if those who try to blame the organizers of the “First Annual Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest,” for the Muslim terrorist attack would have justified if some patriotic American had irrupted in Muslim rally on January alive, a real grievance more justified than the alleged 2015 and made a massacre of Islamic terrorists. After all, Americans are profoundly offended by the abuse of our freedoms by those who made the Muslim rally in support of the savages that decapitate, crucify and burned Christians. The Dimmit media try to justify the terrorist attack because the Mohamed cartoons contest offended the sensibility of Islamic terrorists.
In January 2015, the radical Islamist desecrated the holy soil of Texas. Do not mess with Texas!!!
Remember The artist who was putting a cross in a jar of urine and calling it art? I don’t recall any Christian trying to kill him, do you? I also don’t recall the liberal media jumping on board and saying he shouldn’t do that.that’s because there is nothing wrong with provoking Christians.
A religion that advocates violation of natural rights deserves to be criticized, and those who believe in non violation of natural rights are morally bound to criticize it.
Instead of, "there's nothing wrong with wasting your money" say, "you can do want, but maybe you shouldn't waste your money."
They can shove it up their Muhammad.
Americans Have a Moral Imperative Duty to Insult Islam.
I should have put the sarcasm tag on my statement.
O'Reilly is a pretty thoughtless man, given to the sort of rantings of the Lunchbucket Philosopher, basing his philosophy not on Judeo-Christian teachings, as he never tired of cliche-ing, but on his visceral gut reactions.
Do I like this? Do I not like this? Does this bother me in my gut?
I knock Megyn Kelly for being part of the smug Upper Middle Class Consensus, which is essentially a center-left worldview, even among alleged conservatives, but she's also, unlike Bill O'Reilly, a smart and cutting thinker who is more than capable of thinking in terms of abstraction and cool reasoning, and here she takes heated exception to Bill O'Reily's cowardly carping about Ms. Gellar and how he wouldn't have made the point in quite that way.
Oh? We're criticizing Ms. Gellar, a woman who was just the subject of a jihadi assassination attempt and who may well be a marked woman for the rest of her life, on niggling matters of tone and style?
And we need to do this now? We need to trot out the smug and absolutely unexamined, absolutely thoughtless vanities of Upper Middle Class Respectability and attack Ms. Gellar for not doing it in quite the way we would have, even as, in all likelihood, she scrambles to find long-term security to protect her life?
For drawing a cartoon?
This has been stewing in me since yesterday. It's not just that the left is questioning Ms. Gellar in this; that much I expected.
It's that so much of the right is rushing to join them, and thereby Signal that they have Value per the norms established by the leftist politico-media consensus.
I do wish to not overly attack people I like and genuinely respect; but when I read, for example, Jamie Kirchick, a normally dependable guy and someone I've met slightly, and like well enough, spending 700 words of an 800 word column talking up how base he thinks Pam Gellar is in a column allegedly defending her right to free speech, instead of, you know, actually defending her right to free speech, I become despairing, because if this is all the defense the alleged defenders of Free Speech can muster, then we have no right to free speech.
This is about class. This is all about class.
This is about, specifically, the careerist, cowardly, go-along-to-get-along mores of the Upper Middle Class, the class of people whose parents were all college educated, and of course are college educated themselves; the class that dominates our thought-transmitting institutions (because non-college educated people are more of less shut out of this industry).
It is a class which is deathly afraid of social stigma, and lives in class-based fear being grouped with the wrong people, and which is more interested in Career, quite frankly, than in the actual tradecraft of that Career, which is clarity of thought and clarity of expression.
Thus, our institutions of thought propagation are dominated by the very people who can be easily cowed by the Social Justice Warriors, and who will, therefore, adjust their speech in order to not run afoul of the thoughtless -- and frequently lunatic -- thugs of the censorious left.
The very people we need to be most immune to the menaces of stigma, and the blandishments of career advancement, are, due to the absolute primacy of the Upper Middle Class imperative of advancing one's career and avoiding scandal, stigma, and controversy, the very people most sensitive to such distortions.
Here are the simple facts of the matter, with no need of maligning Ms. Gellar:
Ms. Gellar believes, as almost all on the right claim to believe, that free speech should in fact be free, but that speech is not in fact free, due to the intolerable threats of a determined and lunatic religious minority set on imposing their alien laws of blasphemy against us.
Ms. Gellar acts, as almost all on the right claim that we should act, in defiance of benighted, medieval religious zealots who would forbid her from acting by threat of violence.
Ms. Gellar was, along with all her fellow confreres, the target of an actual assassination plot by heavily-armed jihadists determined to murder her and others present for daring to act like Americans while within the borders of the state formerly called America.
These are the facts. We need not add more to these facts simply to Signal our continuing loyalty to the Upper Middle Class consensus that keeps us employed and welcome at DC functions.
But if we were to add something more personal about Ms. Gellar at this moment, this moment when the echoes of the bullets intended to kill her still ring in the air, we could say the following:
Ms. Gellar is fearless.
Ms. Gellar, for whatever reason, is utterly immune to the thuggish enforcements of conformity imposed by the Social Justice Warrior and their publicity department, which we know as the legacy media.
Ms. Gellar chose to remain adamant about beliefs she formed after 9/11 -- beliefs that most of us once had, at least for a time -- even as many of us walked away from such beliefs, whether because we believed our initial reactions to 9/11 were overreactions, or because, as in many of our cases,the social costs of keeping on with a 9/12 mentality proved too high, so it became easier to subsume ourselves into the warm, soporific bath of the leftist-dominated Politico-Media Consensus.
That is to say, when many of us -- and here I include myself -- chose to stop talking so much about the Islamist threat, not because the Islamist threat had receded, but because the social tolerance for talking about the Islamist threat receded into almost nothing, Pam Gellar soldiered on, unbowed.
Now, as a personal matter, I have had sharp differences with Ms. Gellar. We do not get along.
But this is entirely besides the point.
Americans, acting under the influence of America, were (*expletive deleted*) shot at by crazed religious cultists seeking to impose a cancerous religious lunacy on America.
One does not "support" someone's right to free speech by name-calling them and advertising how far one believes they fall outside the smug Upper Middle Class (leftist-dominated) Consensus.
One supports free speech by supporting those who speak freely.
I am so disgusted by how so many alleged thinkers seem to care more about social positioning than actual thought.
I should not advertise any hostility I may have towards Ms. Gellar to prove I'm "among the acceptable ones."
Acceptable to whom? Who is making this list?
Perhaps I am like Ms. Gellar in this respect: I have long ago decided that I do not wish to be on the list of the Acceptable Ones, and will take no action whatsoever to secure my place upon it. Maybe I have an advantage here: I do not seek the approval of those who bestow Respectability, as I simply do not respect them.
People who make their trade by writing and, one should hope, thinking about ideas should perhaps follow Ms. Gellar's example, not on the particular positions she stakes out, but her example as to her complete indifference as to how any statement will advance or retard her position in the hierarchy of the stultifying, deliberately-obscuring vagueries of Upper Middle Class Consensus of Respectability.
Are we here to talk about ideas and principles, or are we here to secure position and advantage?
A woman spoke.
Men with guns shot at her for speaking.
Do we really need to take an "on the one hand, on the other hand" approach here.
And we need not talk about "tone" or whether Ms. Gellar speaks for us on all things.
One does not award Style Points on a battlefield.
This is why we have no actual conservative movement worth a damn: Because our political officers and our thought leaders are all drawn from, and aspire to advance in, the same Upper Middle Class Northeast-and-California cultural consensus of "respectability."
Some people are ideologues, intensely and primarily interested in Ideas.
Most are not.
And thus most people's first loyalty is not to any abstract Idea, but the more tangible Class they come from, and which gives them Identity, which gives them Place in the world, and which is, for far too many thinkers, a major source of pride and, I dare say, egotistical joy.
The current dominant class, the class that controls the political-media establishment, is this Upper Middle Class, leftism-inflected consensus, and until people can begin seeing this and seeing past it, and until they can begin making their first loyalty to Idea and Principle, which are universal and eternal, rather than Class and Cult, which are nothing but happenstance and ego, we will continue having an "opposition" which continues genuflecting to leftist conformity rather than standing up for ideas.
To escape the Matrix, you must first see the Matrix -- something Andrew Breitbart was fond of observing.
To be a traitor to one's Class is to be a patriot towards humanity.
Maybe Marx said that. Maybe I did. I don't know. But I do believe it. I believe that far too many ideas we have are non-ideas, things we've never actually thought through, but are simply Class Assumptions, and that we are all too afraid to go against our herd, our tribe, and start questioning some (*expletive deleted*) Class Assumptions.
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