How a leftist culture turns freedom fighters into “Islamophobes.”
The American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Jihad Watch co-sponsored the ‘First Annual Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest’. The contest was a response to the Charlie Hebdo Massacre where jihadists murdered twelve people in the Paris offices of the satirical magazine. It was organized in the same spirit as the Je Suis Charlie demonstrations and artists from all over the world who drew cartoons [2] in support of free speech and freedom of the press. Many of the political cartoons reacting to the massacre included cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Similar to many other art contests, entries were submitted online for cash prizes with the winning entries appearing on the sponsor’s websites. The exhibit was held on May 3rd at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, which was chosen because it was the site of the “Stand with the Prophet” conference that denounced ‘Islamophobia’ shortly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
For many centuries, “shouting fire in a crowded theater” set the limits of free speech under English Common Law.
The reason wasn’t a rash of practical jokers shouting “fire!” in London theaters. It was endless, murderous religious preachers like Oliver Cromwell, a Calvinist war leader who ended up killing lots of Catholics and Royalists in England and Ireland between 1642 and 1651.
He did so with the best intentions, of course.
The English civil wars led to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and much improved religious tolerance in England. Before 1776, the American Founders read their Bibles and their John Locke, but they also loved Blackstone on The Laws of England. Blackstone put a lot of thought into free speech and its legal limits, as we can see in our First Amendment, which is based on that legal tradition.
Today, most Americans are sunk in shameful ignorance about their own culture, so they can’t figure out what all the fuss is about with those nice Muslims next door. Aren’t they always telling us how peaceful they are? Liberals can’t be expected to understand the word “jihad” – any more than they ever bothered to read Karl Marx on “revolutionary terror.”
But it’s still the war theology, stupid.
Violent jihad is commanded in the Koran. What confuses liberals is that the Koran also has peaceful verses, so they invariably fall for the sucker bait.
As Obama said, the trouble has to be with those white folks in the Midwest, with their God and their guns.
Obama also blames the Crusades – which raged from 1095 to 1291.
As for jihad warfare – against Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Jains, Chinese, Russian Orthodox, Coptic Christians, and all the rest – it has never stopped. It goes on today in India and China, in Chechnya and Malaysia.
And no, the real problem isn’t those Palestinian refugees from 1949, whose great-great-grandchildren are still being brainwashed to hate Israel.
Liberals are indeed unbelievable idiots, as Lenin almost said. But just as Lenin openly called for hanging Russian mouzhiks if they owned a couple of cows, the Koran calls for killing infidels if they won’t surrender to the nearest warmongering priest. “Islam” means “surrender.” “Muslim” means “one who surrenders.” The word “surrender” means “grovel on the ground so they won’t kill your children”…if you’re lucky.
A thousand years ago, Muslim Ghurids killed all the Buddhist monks they could find in India, because the monks preferred to be slaughtered rather than surrender or defend themselves. According to Muslim historians, it was a glorious victory.
Today there are not many Buddhists left in India. Plenty in Japan, but not in India. In India, they didn’t defend themselves. In Japan, they did.
Every single time a young man named Mahmoud commits another bloody atrocity, the liberal wailing goes up, asking, Why? Why? Why?
It’s always the war theology, stupid. But they will never take the truth for an answer.
The funeral for Nadir Soofi, one of the two jihadis shot dead Sunday in Texas, was held Thursday at a mosque and community center in Kansas City that calls itself the Islamic Society of Greater Kansas City. While Soofi didn’t live in the area, his father and stepmother live in the nearby suburb of Overland Park, Kansas, and presumably they attend that mosque.
This is the same Islamic Society of Greater Kansas City that, in September 2012, exhibited its own deep respect for the First Amendment by starting an online petition urging Pres. Obama to sponsor a bill criminalizing insults to religion (no doubt with one particularly angry “religion” in mind, one that seems obsessively preoccupied with finding insults and psychopathically avenging them).
It is also the same Islamic Society of Greater Kansas City that hosted an appearance by Khalid Yasin (the Harlem-born former gang member, now Muslim convert and televangelist who preaches around the world), who has described the beliefs of Jews and Christians as “filth,” has called Zionists “the pigs and dogs of the earth,” and has called for the death penalty for homosexuals and lesbians. Yasin also believes, by the way, that HIV/AIDS was “devised” and spread by a conspiracy of the U.S. government, the World Health Organization, “Christian groups” and others, and that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.
After two attendees of the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix (ICCPA) were killed in a gunfight Sunday night in Garland, Texas, outside a facility where a “Draw Muhammad” contest was being held, the leaders of the mosque have given conflicting stories about the relationship the two had with the place of worship.
Most of the conflicting accounts have come from mosque president Usama Shami, who has been regularly featured in multiple press reports following the events Sunday evening. Most of his statements have been attempts to distance the mosque from the two would-be terrorists.
How dare Pamela Geller get targeted by terrorists bent on committing mass murder.
That’s been the reaction of a portion of the opinion elite to news that Geller’s “draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas, was (unsuccessfully) assaulted by two heavily armed Muslim men in an attack the Islamic State took responsibility for.
The Washington Post ran an article on Geller headlined, “Event organizer offers no apology after thwarted attack in Texas.”
News that the Post has yet to break about other terrorist targets: “Malala Yousafzai refuses to admit fault for seeking an education”; “Coptic Christians won’t concede error for worshiping wrong God”; “Unrepentant Shiites continue to disagree with Sunnis.”
Congratulations, Qasim Rashid, your short essay in Time is the worst thing I’ve yet read about about free speech. Titled, “What Pamela Geller Advocates Is Not Free Speech,” it is not only utterly devoid of anything approaching a coherent constitutional analysis, it gets the moral equation exactly backwards. Rashid essentially argues that free speech jurisprudence developed for the purpose of protecting the civil rights movement, and Geller isn’t part of the civil rights movement. Oh, and he quotes utter nonsense comparing her speech to speech that led to the Holocaust. Yes, he did. Read for yourself:
America’s current free speech model developed as an attempt to protect — not demonize — religious and racial minorities. “U.S. law only began to protect hateful speech during the 1960s,” writes Garrett Epps. “Southern state governments were trying to criminalize the civil-rights movement for its advocacy of change. White Southerners claimed that the teachings of figures like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X were ‘hate speech’ and would produce ‘race war.’”
New York City police officer Brian Moore will be laid to rest today in Bethpage, Long Island. The 25-year-old member of the NYPD’s anti-crime unit was shot in the face on Saturday night as he and his partner patrolled a Queens street. Moore succumbed to his injuries on Monday, becoming the third officer murdered in the line of duty since December. He had been a cop for five years, following his father, uncle, and cousin in the NYPD.
Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to speak at the funeral. Hizzoner will surely have nothing but praise for Moore and his family. Appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Wednesday, de Blasio called Moore “someone we should all emulate.” It was an uncharacteristically gracious thing for the mayor to say about a cop. We’re more used to hearing about de Blasio’s “fundamental belief” that kids like his biracial son Dante are targeted by the NYPD because of the color of their skin. Those kinds of remarks got the mayor in hot water last year. Since the December murders of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, however, de Blasio has looked for ways to praise cops while preserving his protest-movement bona fides.
Islam has a serious problem. Silencing Pamela Geller isn’t the solution.
Let’s be clear: The great freak-out over Pamela Geller’s “draw Muhammad” contest isn’t about love for Islam or for robust and respectful religious pluralism. Indeed, many of those expressing anguish over blasphemy against Islam show no such concern over even the most vile attacks on the Christian faith. Beyond that, they’re among the leaders in movements designed to banish religious liberty — including Muslim religious liberty — to the margins of American life.
Instead, the fury against Pamela Geller is motivated mostly by fear — by the understanding that there are indeed many, many Muslims who believe that blasphemy should be punished with death, and who put that belief into practice. It’s motivated by the fear that our alliances with even “friendly” Muslim states and “allied” Muslim militias are so fragile that something so insignificant as a cartoon would drive them either to neutrality or straight into the arms of ISIS.
Why aren’t liberals offering Pamela Geller a federal subsidy? Geller is the blogger-activist who organized the “Draw Muhammad” exhibition in Garland, Texas, which inspired some DIY jihadists to attack the event. The would-be terrorists chose poorly: They were cut down by Texas lawmen shortly after wounding a security guard.
Let’s hop in the WayBack Machine for a moment.
In 1986, the National Endowment of Arts paid about $20,000 for Andreas Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” Serrano peed in a glass, plunked a plastic icon of Jesus on the cross into it, and then snapped a picture. I will say the lighting was lovely. But, as strange as it seemed to the “arts community,” some people were offended.
In 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art agreed to host a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit. Mapplethorpe’s work was edgy, particularly going by the attitudes at the time. There were the obligatory sexual bondage scenes, urine-drinking (artistic urine: is there anything it can’t do?), and, of course, his most famous work: a self-portrait showing a bullwhip going someplace the sun reportedly does not shine.
Martin Amis, Elie Wiesel, Avraham Sutzkever, and others have managed to write literature about the Holocaust, arguably in a way that does justice to its horrors. But the Holocaust has also become the subject of much bad fiction. Adam Kirsch reviews a recent example, The Death’s Head Chess Club, which focuses on the relationship between a somewhat benign SS officer and a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz, and their reunion in Amsterdam two decades later:
A cautionary tale: ‘The Death’s Head Chess Club’ and other period fantasies are the inevitable next thing in Shoah fiction
When Theodor Adorno made his famous pronouncement about there being no poetry after Auschwitz, he was thinking about good poetry. Art that successfully transforms reality, elevating it to a plane of harmony and permanence, can only be a falsification of an experience as violent and inhuman as the Holocaust. In time, however, writers emerged who showed that a different kind of art can do some kind of justice to horror—an art not of beauty and transformation, but of fragmentation and austere witness. The poetry of Paul Celan, the prose of Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, created the style we still associate with authentic writing about the Holocaust. That style renounces beauty and cleverness in the name of more sustaining values like humility and truth. Not coincidentally, all of those writers were themselves victims and survivors of Nazism; for them, the Holocaust was not just another literary subject, but the central truth of their lives.
