JED BABBIN: IN DEFENSE OF PAMELA GELLER -LONDON CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH
http://www.epictimes.com/londoncenter/2015/05/in-defense-of-pamela-geller/
Free speech, like all of our Constitutional rights, is something we have to use. If it isn’t used, and used as the Founders intended it to be used, it will disappear.
The Muslim terrorists’ attack on Pamela Geller’s “Draw Mohammed” contest in Garland, Texas ended in the welcome and deserved deaths of the attackers before they could harm any of the participants. It also has resulted in a fit of knuckle-rubbing denunciations of Geller and the event even among conservatives. The media’s message – including from the conservative media — is entirely wrong.
Liberals, like the idiots of MSNBC, say that Geller’s event was “hate speech” which they contend isn’t protected by the First Amendment. Some on the conservative side say the event was needlessly provocative, an abuse of free speech and – in one faux-conservative Washington Post columnist’s terms – “baiting the field” for the terrorists.
But the facts, and our constitutional jurisprudence, indicate exactly the opposite: it was necessarily provocative. And, buried in that intellectual framework, is not just an essential defense of free speech that Geller’s event forced us to recognize but also the broader concept that it was an essential defensive act in the ideological war in which we’re engaged.
Islam is an ideology as much as it is a religion. It is an integrated series of beliefs upon which a system of corporeal and spiritual government is intended to be based. The Islamic religion/ideology requires that anyone who insults Islam’s prophet or draws an image of him must be executed.
There is no difference between the purportedly “blasphemous” book “Satanic Verses” and the cartoon that won Geller’s contest. In 1989, when Salman Rushdie’s book was published, it was condemned by the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini who ordered Rushdie’s death. He has lived in hiding ever since. The fatwa condemning him lives on, renewed and revived in 2014 by Ayatollah Khatami. The winning cartoon pictured a manic Mohammed shouting “you can’t draw me,” and the hands of the cartoonist, his unseen face saying, “That’s why I draw you.”
The January massacre of editors and cartoonists at the Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine was motivated by the magazine’s drawings of Mohammed. The only difference between the Charlie Hebdo attackers and the two cretins who tried to shoot up Geller’s event is that the former succeeded and the latter didn’t.
Both sets of attackers had the same two motives founded in the same ideology-cum-religion. Our First Amendment addresses both elements of it. First, the terrorists want to intimidate us out of our Free Speech right, which our government is prevented from restricting. Second, they want to force Christians, Jews and followers of every religion other than Islam to become Muslims, which our government is likewise prevented from establishing as a state religion.
In this, the terrorists are conducting acts of ideological warfare.
To defend against their violence takes both moral and physical courage. The courage of the Garland police officer, advancing into the gun battle to kill the terrorists, was exemplary. (And so, apparently, was his marksmanship. It’ll be a long time before there’s another terrorist attack in Texas.)
Whether or not you like Pamela Geller, her moral courage to hold the “Draw Mohammed” event and the courage of each of its participants is necessary – no, make that essential – to responding to Islam’s encroachment on our religious and ideological freedom. Too few in our society – and no one in government since September 11, 2001 – has had the moral courage to condemn those in Islam who wage their ideological war against our culture, our way of life and our Constitution.
It’s not just Islam that has an ideology. So does America. Ours is not written in a religion’s scripture, but in our Constitution. Islam’s ideological attack is not only on the First Amendment but on every part of the Constitution and the system of government it prescribes.
The Founders intended that the First Amendment protect unpopular, even outrageous, speech. That’s why the execrable conduct of the Westboro Baptist Church’s tiny crew, shouting condemnations of soldiers at their funerals, is tolerated. That’s why publicity hounds posing as artists can immerse a crucifix in urine or display a portrait of Mary covered in elephant dung. That’s why people can go around denying that the Holocaust ever happened.
There’s every reason to condemn that sort of conduct, and we do. Most of my pals would love to give the Westboro morons a good sock in the nose, but none do because they recognize their right to speak in the most outrageous manner. Conversely our tolerance of their outrageous speech means we cannot tolerate some Muslims’ actions to restrict otherwise free speech because they feel offended.
There is no Islamic exception to the Constitution that gives Muslims license to impose any restriction on the Constitution’s preservation of our freedoms.
We can win the Islamic ideological war against us if we defend against it on the same basis that they attack our freedoms. It poses a direct challenge to our Constitutional rights that can only be answered in one way: we have to use those rights or we will lose them.
To win this ideological war requires that we first recognize it for what it is and then use the tools our Constitution gives us. Refusing to accept the limitation of our rights and speaking out about the superiority of our ideology over the terrorists’, is the best place to start.
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