Today is a dark day for Europe. The barbaric assault on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is an attack most immediately on the journalists and cartoonists who worked there, 12 of whom are dead, executed in cold blood for the ‘crime’ of saying what they think. But this horrific act was also an attack on Europe itself, on all of us, on our fundamental right to freedom of thought and speech. None of us can feel the pain currently being felt by the friends and families of the murdered journalists and illustrators – but all of us should feel assaulted by this massacre, for it is designed to chill us and make us cower, to make us censor ourselves or else suffer the consequences.
As we in the United States sat in horror, watching the views of a dozen people mowed down by Islamic gunmen in the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, we were confronted once again, with the stark fact that there is a civilizational clash between Western liberal democracies and the world of Islamism.
Many of us first became aware of the disproportionate extent of rage that the Islamists have over any depiction of their prophet in 1988, when Salman Rushdie first published his Satanic Verses. This fictionalized account of the prophet Mohammed led to a fatwa calling for his assassination, bringing the writer into hiding for most of his life. This was the opening salvo on our Western freedoms, fired from Tehran, by none other than the Iranian Supreme leader, the late Ayatollah Rouhella Khomeini on Feb. 14, 1989.
“They picked them up by their arms and legs and held them over the brick furnace until their clothes caught fire. And then they threw them [alive] inside the furnace.” — Javeed Maseeh, family spokesman, concerning a Christian couple in Pakistan murdered on rumors they had burned verses from the Qur’an.
“I would appeal to your honor to put pressure on the government of Pakistan to end misuse of blasphemy laws against Christians, Ahmadiyyia and other religious minorities and condition US Aid on human rights and repeal of blasphemy laws.” — From a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama by Dr. Nazir S. Bhutti, President of the Pakistan Christian Congress, expressing surprise that the U.S. did not even bother to condemn the burning of Christians alive.
East Jerusalem: Despite constant and ever bolder attacks on a church, police refuse to respond to pleas for help from the Christian congregation.
It’s not about free speech
On Thursday evening, three Israeli cartoonists were interviewed on the evening news about their art, which involves the figurative “slaughter of sacred cows.”
The item was one of many references to Wednesday’s literal slaughter of two policemen and 10 journalists, among them cartoonists, at the Paris weekly Charlie Hebdo.
The questions, put by Channel 2’s Yonatan Riger to Amos Biderman, Ze’ev Engelmeyer and Daniela London-Dekel — each well-known for pictorial editorials on societal, political and religious ills — centered on three main issues: whether their often antagonistic caricatures ever cause them to fear for their lives; whether there is such a thing as taking free speech too far; and whether they would dare spoof Islam today.
Their responses were as telling as they were predictable.
“Would you draw Muhammad?” Riger asked London-Dekel.
Hey, please don’t get me wrong….I am appalled and saddened by the jihad in Paris. But is I am going to “suis” anyone it is the following:
Je suis the people of Israel who have lived through jihad terror after jihad terror for all the years of their existence- random murders in markets, buses, bus stops, pizzerias, mangled strollers in cafes, babies executed in their beds…..the gruesome list goes on and on. And the media is as indifferent to this as it is to the metronomic regularity of jihad in Africa.
Je suis Geert Wilders whose bravery has trumpeted the cause and the locus of Ilamic jihad, namely the Koran, and for this he has been berated, sued, and ostracized for so called “Isalmophobia.”
Je suis the indefatigable Gisele Bat Y’eor who predicted that this barbarism would come to Europe in her book “Eurabia” and all her books and essays…all greeted with a major yawn by mainstream media.
And most of all je suis American- where jihad has struck and will continue to strike and claim victims until we stop babbling about Islamophobia and “the religion of peace”
In the wake of today’s massacre in Paris, there has already been a lot of preening about journalistic bravery. Much of it has come from people who, it can be shown, don’t have the guts to work in Charlie Hebdo’s newsroom. Preening about free speech may be reassuring at times like this, but what we need are apologies from those who haven’t done enough to defend free speech, as well as a real desire to hold those journalists and politicians who have undermined free speech accountable. As a smart academic on Twitter put it, “Today, as journalists ‘bravely’ voice support for Charlie Hebdo, ask them for their piece calling on Yale to publish the Muhammad cartoons.”
From Endeavour Hills to the 11th arrondissement, terrorism is presented as so many baffling dots in a pattern that defies connection. The real enemy we are told, and the persistent theme, is that Islamic fanaticism’s greatest evil is that it abets the villainous cause of “the right”. Best not get too fussed, in other words
The gruesome massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists and policemen in Paris has shocked the world. In a world of unrelenting terror, people still find it in themselves to be shocked, brutalised and terrorised anew. We are not yet inured to the violence and death that surrounds us.
But in the midst of the collective mourning and outrage that acts of terrorism and barbarity evoke, we also have a few discernible trends in media reporting that deserve close attention because they reflect increasingly common ways of conceptualising the problem. Instead of dealing with the issues at hand head-on, some journalists and writers engage in a kind of a prevarication and obfuscation that most readers would find difficult to recognise and from which it would be difficult to disengage. Further, such reporting usually involves to some degree a strategy that I will discuss in the rest of this essay: the shifting of focus onto a demonised right-wing conceived of as being perpetually threatening and on the verge of eruption. As Islamist outrages proliferate, it is this phantom army of the right that is offered, ultimately, as the real threat that needs to be confronted.
By positing the generalised “right” as the real problem, discussion of the crisis at hand is pre-empted and public outrage defused (or channeled in another direction). A close reading of instances of such reporting is necessary because the extent of manipulation of public discourse we find today is so great that it is difficult to challenge. This affects political consciousness in ways whose impact we cannot yet fully understand.
It is not as if the West hasn’t known for some time that a considerable body of Islamic thought endorses the slaughter of innocents to achieve its ends. But it has been much easier to ignore the grim reality — and so much safer, too. Don’t expect the Paris massacre to change that.
The mass murder of Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier, editor of Charlie Hebdo, and so many of his editorial staff by heavily armed Islamists will no doubt be described as “senseless” and/or “cowardly” by political leaders and most of the mainstream media. It was neither. If they were cowards, they would have stayed home and continued to receive French social security like so many of their fellow Muslims. The mere preparedness to kill unarmed infidels does not prove cowardice. Typical of jihadis the world over, they were prepared to fight to the death.
Why Do the Media Refer to ‘the Prophet Mohammed’?The title implies a particular view of a historical figure. By Ian Tuttle
The occasion of California senator Barbara Boxer’s announcing her retirement offers an opportunity to reflect on the strange life of titles. Mrs. Boxer — I mean “Senator Boxer” — was a stickler for her own, famously chiding a brigadier general for calling her “ma’am” while testifying before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee: “You know, do me a favor, could you say ‘senator’ instead of ‘ma’am’? I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it.”
One suspects that Boxer would be thrilled if her name were never uncoupled from “Senator.” That is unlikely to happen, Boxer’s political accomplishments being something less than world-historical, but the sharp distinction obvious here between the woman and her honorific is not made in another title-name combination in the news of late: “the Prophet Mohammed.” It has become routine to refer to the central figure of Islam with his title attached. But why?
Perhaps it is a simple conflation. That has happened throughout history. Consider “Caesar Augustus” and “Tiberius Caesar,” both of whose titles — “Caesar,” from the great Julius — have come down to us affixed to their names.
The same happened to Samuel Johnson, the great literary critic and subject of James Boswell’s unsurpassed biography, who is often just the illustrious “Dr. Johnson.”
For a more recent example, there is Tiger Woods — that is, Eldrick Tont Woods, who was quickly recognized to be a “tiger,” or outstanding golfer.
And, of course, there are religious examples in abundance: Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Saint Augustine.
Perhaps “the Prophet Mohammed” is no different from any of these – “prophet,” like “mahatma,” a sort of meaningless but customary adjective.
Then again, there is the syntactically identical formulation “Jesus the Christ” — but when was the last time one heard that combination employed (non-ironically) on cable news? No, “Jesus” is just another single-namer — like Shakespeare or Churchill or Cher. (And, on more vulgar occasions, a perfectly common oath.)
The communist government in Laos uses the holiday season to pursue a violent crackdown on Christians of the Hmong ethnic minority.
Christmas festivities, religious and secular, are enjoyed across East Asia. But not in Laos. This year the communist government used the holiday season to pursue a violent crackdown on Christians of the Hmong ethnic minority.
In November Radio Free Asia reported village leaders kicking out families who refused to renounce Christianity. Recent Hmong converts were jailed until they reverted to traditional animist practices.
A Christmas Day press release from the Center for Public Policy Analysis in Washington painted an even more dire picture. Not only did the authorities prohibit public observances of Christmas, they carried out torture and killings of Christians. According to the CPPA’s executive director, the Laotian government coordinated the crackdown with neighboring Vietnam.
