Speech is not violence

Claiming speech is violence will result in violence.

Last week, Salman Rushdie was to address the Chautauqua Institution on the topic of freedom of speech. He has some experience with those who would stifle it. Thirty three years ago he wrote a book titled The Satanic Verses. He was in hiding for the next decade. And it turns out that wasn’t long enough.

For his title, he looked at a few words in the Quran, as interpreted by some Islamic historians. Islamic fundamentalists are triggered by the concept raised by those co-religionists as long ago as ~900AD. In any case, Rushdie was writing a novel. Fiction.

It’s no surprise, though, that Rushdie’s daring to discuss it was not well received in certain quarters. He upset the same Islamist fanatics who encouraged the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo, the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the threats to the Jyllands-Posten for publishing cartoons, the mass shooting at Bataclan and Pulse, and other murders, arsons and riots too common to detail.

Fundamentalist Islam insists religion and the State are one. Naturally, then, Rushdie’s temerity provoked a Muslim cleric and Head-of-State (Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini) to issue a bounty for Rushdie’s death in 1989.

AKA a ‘fatwa.’ In polities where church and state are separated, we don’t yet have a special term for state religion-sanctioned murder. We are working toward it via the Church of George Floyd, the Cathedral of Transexual Pronounism, the Pieties of the Green New Deal, and the rite of Skin Color Original Sin, but we aren’t there yet.

That does not mean progress is not being made here. This week a militant follower of Islam with ties to Iran stabbed Rushdie a dozen times. As yet, the police can’t find a motive. You have to wonder how the find their own butts.

Rushdie’s stabbing is merely a reminder that “don’t say anything we don’t like to hear” fanatics can be dangerous. We have some of our own.

Every day needs to be ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed day.’ Here’s a comprehensive “compendium of images that depict Mohammed (the 7th-century founder of Islam), spanning all historical periods, cultures, genres, styles, formats and themes.”

Here’s my own paltry contribution.

Every day needs to be ‘Everybody write The Satanic Verses day.’

Rushdie’s stabbing is ethically no different from the persecution of Kyle Rittenhouse, the firing of James Damore, the threats against J. D. Rowling, or the demonization of Nicholas Sandmann.

Why did France allow these thugs in the country?

Why did France allow the tabloid to provoke Muslims?
-by Anjem Choudary, may his name be well known.

Mr. Choudary has risen in defense of the murderers in the Charlie Hebdo massacre:

Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.

Anjem Choudary obviously feels quite strongly about the 12 people murdered at Charlie Hebdo. How else to explain defending the murderers by saying Islam sanctions murder via divine inspiration? He portrays Muslims as mind numbed robots, in thrall to an interpretation of the supernatural unchanged since the 7th century, and which can apparently justify any imaginable atrocity.

How can Muslims be expected to behave about a drawing? Well, badly, but that is their duty. And, anyway, it’s France’s fault.

Although Muslims may not agree about the idea of freedom of expression, even non-Muslims who espouse it say it comes with responsibilities. In an increasingly unstable and insecure world, the potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Muhammad are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Although?? As in, “Although Muslims are commanded by their religion to kill those whose speech they dislike, some non-Muslims agree speech you don’t like should be limited?” What does this sentence even mean? It’s peculiar nonsense as a justification for murder by a farrow of fanatics.

Choudary assures us, as a matter of principle, that Muslims CAN NOT agree that freedom of speech should be tolerated, and your exercise of that freedom is justification for killing you. The responsibility of Muslims is to kill you, sooner rather than later, unless you observe your responsibility to shut up.

Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them. The strict punishment if found guilty of this crime under sharia (Islamic law) is capital punishment implementable by an Islamic State. This is because the Messenger Muhammad said, “Whoever insults a Prophet kill him.

The religion of psychotic overreaction.

However, because the honor of the Prophet is something which all Muslims want to defend, many will take the law into their own hands, as we often see.

The religion of honor killing.

To what secular law does one hew when commanded by Mohammed to honor him with murder? This is not “taking the law into their own hands.” There is no such law to take into one’s hands, and there can be no such penalty prescribed by it.

Within liberal democracies, freedom of expression has curtailments, such as laws against incitement and hatred.

Some liberal democracies don’t have such laws, and even those who do have this quaint notion of “justice” to contend with. Those liberal democracies with thought crime laws are reaping what they sowed, both in blood and in giving encouragement to Islamofacist apologists such as Mr. Choudary.

The truth is that Western governments are content to sacrifice liberties and freedoms when being complicit to torture and rendition — or when restricting the freedom of movement of Muslims, under the guise of protecting national security.

Such as the freedom of movement to fly airliners into the Twin Towers? Perhaps Choudary has confused cause and effect.

So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?

Umm, because the French government, so far, and in spite of your efforts, is not an Islamofascist state? Because they still can’t quite believe how unhinged you are?

It is time that the sanctity of a Prophet revered by up to one-quarter of the world’s population was protected.

It is time that the murderous thugs who believe in the sanctity of this particular “Prophet” were prevented from committing murder so that one-quarter of the world’s population no longer suffers under their yoke. It’s time Mr. Choudary realized what he has written is protected by the same principles he would like destroyed.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day Update

“If it’s not the Crusades, it’s the cartoons.”
-Dubya

I am reminded by Mind Numbed Robot, (Everybody Draw Mohammed Day 2010) to direct you to these earlier TOC posts. I am sure you’ll enjoy them all, but I think April 26 is definitive:

Saturday, April 24, 2010
“Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”

Monday, April 26, 2010
Everybody Burn a Flag with Mohammed’s Image Day

Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Accommodating diversity

Saturday, May 01, 2010
The Mohammed Image Archive

While I’m here, let me link some other comment of note today:

Everybody Draws Mohammed Day [Mark Steyn]

The New Free Speech Movement

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

You can tell what it is supposed to be from the post title.How Mohammed might have been drawn if South Park had ever actually depicted him.

H/T Openoffice Draw, without which this would have been even worse. I don’t know if software is able to have a fatwa declared against it. OO will just have to take its chances, I guess.

See also:

Announcing Blazingcatfur’s Everybody Draw Mohammed Day Contest Finalists..set to music too…a really Mohammedan enraging tune in fact

and…

Why We’re Having an Everybody Draw Mohammed Contest on Thursday May 20

The wages of appeasement, the fruits of hypocrisy

What Did You Say About Muhammad?!

RTWT, here’s a sample:

…the West has perpetuated a vicious cycle wherein Muslim sensitivities are ever heightened and outraged at the slightest slight, and Western freedoms of expression are correspondingly diminished and trampled upon…

…if you voluntarily act like a dhimmi — a subjugated non-Muslim who must live in debased humility — you will be treated like a dhimmi…

Emphasis mine. It’s why former President Carter is known around here as Dhimmi Carter.

Also please note the “Support South Park” widget is removed from this site. Comedy Central caved to an Islamist blogger and then announced they are considering launching a series titled “JC,” mocking Christ.

I have no problem with mocking religion, or God, but such selective mocking is a disgusting appeasement perpetrated by the vertebrally challenged. How do the hypocrites in charge of Comedy Central even stand upright?

Confronting Islamist fanatics over their exquisite and false sensitivities is important, and bringing the Comedy Central cell to heel would be a good start.

The Mohammed Image Archive

Is here.

A sample:

“Mohammed’s Flight from Mecca in 622 AD; Algerian color postcard from the 1920s or ’30s. Mohammed is the figure entering the cave. The original postcard is in a private collection.
(Hat tip: Martin H.)”

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day is May 20th. Join in the centuries long tradition and add to the archive.