RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two French festivals on Friday cancelled shows by Eagles of Death Metal, the band whose November 13th show in Paris turned into a bloodbath, after the frontman made remarks critical of Muslims.

The Rock en Seine and Cabaret Vert festivals took issue with an interview by singer and guitarist Jesse Hughes, who renewed allegations that Muslim staff at the Bataclan club was involved in the attack.

“Being in total disagreement with Jesse Hughes’ recent allegations given in an interview with an American media (outlet), both Cabaret Vert and Rock en Seine festivals have decided to cancel the band’s performance,” said a statement by the two festivals, which take place in late August.

Eagles of Death Metal had briefly become heroes in France after Islamic extremists assaulted their concert, killing 90 people in the deadliest of a series of coordinated attacks that claimed 130 lives across the metropolis. But Hughes has since proved controversial in his remarks. Unlike many rockers, he is known for his right-wing politics and champions gun ownership as well as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.#In an interview published last week, Hughes called for greater scrutiny of Muslims in the West and alleged that conservative Christians were unfairly being blamed for global problems.

“I saw Muslims celebrating in the street during the attack. I saw it with my own eyes. In real time! How did they know what was going on? There must have been coordination,” he told Taki’s Magazine, a publication of Greek-born conservative commentator Taki Theodoracopulos that has faced criticism for its writings on race.

This is my favorite story in some time. And it’s not even a “narrative” — it really happened.

First, though, the disgraceful background: Just when you thought German chancellor Angela Merkel had run out of nails to hammer into the coffin of Western liberalism, she permitted a criminal prosecution to proceed against Jan Böhmermann, a young German comedian, for the “crime” of insulting Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, our Islamic-supremacist, jihad-supporting NATO “ally,” who — if we may borrow a phrase from a good friend of his — has “fundamentally transformed” Turkey from a Western-leaning democracy to a suffocating sharia state.

Herr Böhmermann performed an edgy stand-up routine that featured a poem in which he described Erdogan as a “goat f***er,” among other not-niceties. A few months earlier, the comic had similarly poked fun at the Turkish president as a way of illuminating the obscenities of Erdogan’s dictatorial rule. This prompted the thin-skinned despot’s government to lodge a formal complaint with Berlin. Böhmermann’s latest skit was intended to draw attention to the fact that, with all the talk of bringing Turkey into the EU, Erdogan — far from embracing Western liberalism — was seeking to impose his blasphemy fatwa on Germany.

In Imam Erdogan’s emirate, which was the main focus of my book Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, such insolence lands a person in jail — as, by the way, does political dissent and what used to be known as news reporting.

As previously noted here, Erdogan is one of the pioneers of the Muslim Brotherhood–crafted “integrate but don’t assimilate” strategy for overrunning Europe and, in time, the United States. The plan urges Muslims to relocate to the West but maintain Islamic mores while pressuring the home governments to accommodate sharia (Islamic law).

A few years back, Erdogan gave a speech to a throng of Muslim migrants in Cologne, decrying Western pressure on Muslims to assimilate in their new European homelands as “a crime against humanity.” His goal is to transport repressive Islamic standards to the West, where they will snuff out free speech and other liberties inconvenient to tyrants. The game-plan is working to a fare-thee-well, feeding the explosion of Islamic enclaves that gradually assert their autonomy from Western governance while serving as incubators of jihadist radicalization.

Merkel is supposed to be part of the West’s defense against such aggression. But she is not the West. She is modern, feckless Europe. So when Erdogan complained about a harmless comic bit, she snapped to. Under an antiquated German law, Böhmermann could be sentenced to five years in prison for a “deliberate insult” of a foreign head of state.

Taken to its extremes, the urge to cleanse a culture of elements that do not live up to the politically correct orthodoxy currently in political vogue unsettlingly echoes the Taliban and ISIS credos of destroying everything that does not accord with their Quranic views. The desire “not to offend,” taken to its logical conclusion, is a totalitarian impulse, which threatens to destroy everything that disagrees with its doctrines. Crucially, who gets to decide what is offensive?

The question arises: How much purging and expiation will be needed to render a country’s culture politically correct?

“When we have days of carnivals and music the goal is that these days should be experienced as positive by everyone. The Swedish flag is not allowed as part of carnival dress. … Positive and bright feelings must be in focus. … School photos must obviously be free of national symbols.” — Swedish school in Halmstad.

Rome covered up its classical nude statues for a visit from Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, in January 2016. A decade ago, who would have even imagined such sycophancy?

In 1966, one of Sweden’s most popular children’s writers, Jan Lööf, published Grandpa is a Pirate, an illustrated children’s book, which featured, among other characters, the wicked pirate Omar and the street peddler, Abdullah. The book has been a bestseller ever since, and has been translated into English (as My Grandpa is a Pirate), Spanish, French and other languages. Ten years ago, 100,000 copies of it were even distributed to the Swedish public with McDonald’s Happy Meals, as part of an initiative to support reading among children.

Ah, but those were the days of yesteryear! Now, fifty years later, the book is no longer tolerable. The now 76-year-old author told Swedish news outlets that his publisher recently said that unless he rewrites the book and changes the illustrations, it will be taken off the market. The publisher also threatened to withdraw another of his books unless it is redone: it features an illustration of a black jazz musician who sleeps with his sunglasses on.