RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour”.

That was how it began seven years ago. Everyone Draw Mohammed Day had spread over the internet. And with it came the death threats. Molly Norris, who got it all started, soon had to go into hiding.

The South African cartoonist Zapiro decided to draw Mohammed on a psychiatrist’s couch. “Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour,” Mohammed complains. A newspaper on a coffee table in the clouds carries headlines about Everyone Draw Mohammed Day and Jihadist fatwas.

Jonathan Shapiro, the leftist cartoonist behind Zapiro, quickly found out that Mohammed’s followers really don’t have a sense of humor. Threats such as “You’ve got to watch your back” and “This will cost him his life” came pouring in.

Shapiro met with Muslim leaders and tried to establish his bona fides. He hated Israel and the “Islamophobia of the US War on Terror”. Not to mention European Burka bans and the “juvenile Islamophobic Facebook campaign”. He wasn’t one of those wicked Islamophobes. He was a good lefty.

“In South Africa, here Muslims are empowered,” Shapiro complained to the same imaginary psychiatrist in another comic strip “Muslim clerics told me this week they’re all for Freedom of Expression… except for drawing the prophet. Making exceptions for Religious Censorship is hard for a cartoonist.”

Shapiro had missed the point. In Islam, religion is politics and politics is religion. Supporting Islamic empowerment means endorsing theocratic censorship. To mock Mohammed is to undermine the supremacist foundations of Islamist theocracy. And that challenges Islamic power.

The apologies didn’t help. The appeasement didn’t matter. They still wanted him dead.

The Muslim terrorists who plotted to kill Shapiro didn’t care that he would go on to make amends by drawing a deranged Netanyahu brandishing a nuclear missile and compare Israel’s bombing of Hamas Jihadists to Guernica. In Shapiro’s Israel Apartheid Week cartoon, a cartoon Jewish figure who could have sprung from an issue of Der Sturmer, concedes that Israel is an Apartheid state.

The Muslim terrorists in Gitmo were pictured huddled behind the bars of a giant Statue of Liberty wearing Obama’s face. After Orlando, Trump was depicted in a Nazi uniform holding a sign, “Ban Muslims”. Surely those Muslim terrorists wouldn’t come for him. Or would they?

The years passed. Zapiro defended terrorists and smeared those who fought them. But the terrorists came for him anyway.

They did not care that he hated America and Israel. They did not care that he had stood up for the Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in Gitmo. They cared only that he had offended Mohammed.

And there could be only one punishment for that crime.

The success of Marine Le Pen in the first round of the French presidential election has the global left resorting to its usual exaggerations and dire predictions of a fascist resurgence. As happened with the progressive smears of Donald Trump, Le Pen’s similar appeals to patriotism, national identity, and the need to defend the nation’s culture and interests are immediately turned into sinister dog-whistles for the crypto-fascists, racist hordes just waiting for the Great Leader to start the pogroms and fill the gulags.

One hundred days into Trump’s administration, of course, nothing has happened that comes even close to beginning a fascist transformation of America. But the persistent phenomenon of the eternal fascist threat raises old questions about and other failed collectivists political ideologies.

Why is “fascism” or “right-wing” an epithet, but “communist” or “left-wing” isn’t? Why do the media, even those considered conservative, use a phrase like “extreme right” or “hard right,” but seldom use “extreme left” or “hard left”? Why is Le Pen’s National Front regularly described with such epithets, but Communist Parties or radical Green Parties rarely are? And why is there the vaguely honorific cliché “a man of the left,” but not the equivalent “a man of the right”?

In short, how has an ideology whose butcher’s bill is twice as large as fascism’s managed to stay acceptable? How do progressives in America like Bernie Sanders boast of honeymooning in the Soviet Union, but do not pay a political price for admiring a regime that killed more innocents than Hitler? How can a police-state like Cuba, which imprisons and murders and impoverishes its own people, continue to attract starry-eyed European and American progressives who at home loudly proclaim their concern for human rights and freedom and equality? Why are tee-shirts that sport images of mass murderers like Mao or thugs like Che considered chic, while Hitler’s or Mussolini’s likeness is verboten? Why in Europe can you wave the hammer-and-sickle flag of the defunct Soviet Union, but the swastika is forbidden by law? Why can the New York Times write a headline reading, “When Communism Inspired Americans,” when we will never, ever see anywhere a story about fascism “inspiring” Americans?

Or how is it that, as Martin Amis writes,

Everyone knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkutlag and Solovestky. Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky. Everybody knows of the six million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the six million of the terror-famine.

And why do there still exist legal Communist Parties in the West, and a superpower like China that still identifies itself as communist, but Nazism is a despised fringe cult that gets attention only because it’s a useful political demon for the left? If murderous tyranny is our standard for condemning and ostracizing Nazism, why isn’t it equally used to judge and proscribe the most murderous tyranny in human history?

A representative of the globalist elite faces a tribune of globalization’s victims. That’s the superficial read on Sunday’s presidential runoff between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in France. The deeper question is whether French voters accommodate themselves to reality or cling tighter to their economic illusions. Plenty of clues about which path France might take were on display during the May Day holiday.

Start with the France of illusions. An estimated 40,000 red-clad activists snaked their way from the Place de la République to the Place de la Nation in the early afternoon. Hammer-and-sickle flags abounded. So did portraits of beloved mass murderers like Che Guevara. Gangs of masked youth set off firecrackers that boomed like gunshots.
One placard showed Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Macron side by side, asking: “Plague or Cholera?” A typical slogan was “Neither nation nor boss!”—a double rejection of Ms. Le Pen’s nationalism and Mr. Macron’s free-market liberalism. These sum up the views of supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist firebrand who was eliminated, barely, in the first round last month.

The Mélenchonists have a great deal in common with Ms. Le Pen’s National Front, which held its own angry rally earlier in the day. Both camps would lower the retirement age to 60 from 62. Ms. Le Pen would keep the 35-hour workweek while Mr. Mélenchon would shorten it to 32 hours. Both would boost welfare spending and sever or strain the country’s trade ties in various ways.

The Le Pen-Mélenchon Venn diagram has a large overlapping set, because both camps blame everyone but the French for the country’s malaise.

“The French try to erase historical experience,” Pascal Bruckner tells me. The literary journalist is one of a very few classical liberals among French public intellectuals. He says his compatriots “have forgotten the experience of 1989 and only see the bad aspects of capitalism and liberal democracy.”

The tragedy of France, Mr. Bruckner says, is that the country never had a Margaret Thatcher or Gerhard Schröder to implement a dramatic pro-growth program. Incremental, haphazard changes have only prolonged the crisis. “So if you’re unemployed it must be because of the market economy.”

Yet it wasn’t shadowy globalists who in 1999 imposed a 35-hour workweek to make overtime labor prohibitively expensive. The law was meant to encourage firms to hire more workers, but like most efforts to subjugate markets to politics, it ended up doing more harm than good. Now it’s the main barrier to hiring in a country where the unemployment rate is stuck north of 10%.

Nor was it global markets that levied a corporate tax rate of 33% (plus surcharges for larger firms), a top personal rate of 45%, and a wealth tax and other “social fees” that repelled investors and forced the country’s best and brightest to seek refuge in places like London, New York and Silicon Valley.

Nor did globalization build a behemoth French bureaucracy that crowds out the private economy. As of January, this has created a 98% public-debt-to-GDP ratio. CONTINUE AT SITE