Well, that’s one way to decide on this piece of art. Of course, Barcepundit is less sanguine about it; he knows what the artist is up to when he displays this at a fair in Madrid:

As I’ve said many times before, I’m not a believer, but I know when I see a religious offence and more than that, I know when I see a double standard by people who say that we should respect artistic freedom when one religion is mocked and also say that the Mohammed cartoons are an intolerable offence to people’s religious beliefs.

Unlike Barcepundit, I am a believer. And I agree with him that the point of this piece of “art” is to offend, to be edgily avant-garde.

But it fails on both levels:

mockery of Christian icons has long since jumped the shark. It is sooo 1980 you want to pat the “artist” on the head and wish him better luck next time.

It also fails to offend me. In fact, I wouldn’t mind owning a copy. I wouldn’t actually pay money for it, but I wouldn’t mind having it. I could put it in the tulip bed, under the mimosa and next to the cow skull which has mums growing out of the eye holes — my memento mori. The Jesus-with-Phoenix missile statue would make a nice counterpoint.

One of Barcepundit’s readers emailed him:

“Just saw your story with the picture of Jesus holding a Phoenix missile. I was commissioned into the U.S. Navy through Aviation Officers Candidate School at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Pensacola, Florida (remember the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman”). I remember that the chapel on the Naval Air Station had a statue of the Virgin Mary in it holding an F-4 Phantom in her hands (Our Lady of Loretto is the patron saint of aviators). Context and perspective make all the difference.”

That’s the point, isn’t it? Context and perspective actually provide the meaning of any event, and it is the participant’s provision of meaning that matters. I was in that chapel many times as a child and I’m sure I saw the statue holding a jet. It wouldn’t have made a particular impression: a Catholic school education includes lessons on the concept of the just war.

In a naval chapel, such an icon would make sense: anyone who knows enough jet pilots for any length of time knows jet pilots’ widows. My cousin was one at the ripe old age of twenty three.

Wish I did remember seeing that statue.

 
Want some good news for a change? Tired of “frothing fundos” as eteraz calls them? Sick of listening to Beltway chatter?

Well, here’s a little gem from the comment section in Iraq The Model’s post, The UIA Faces the Threat of Being Outnumbered. The post itself is informative — it sounds busy, contentious and hopeful:

It looks like the real negotiations between the political powers have just begun with great pressures on the politicians to contain their differences and start building the state especially with escalating public contempt about the delay in forming the government.

There’s also pressure from the international community in this regard; today the security council urged the Iraqi politicians to form the government as soon as possible and to make it a government that represents the entire Iraq spectrum.

Then, way down in the responses, you find this information from a commenter, Maurice. Unfortunately, his comment is without email or homepage, but I’m willing to believe him when he says he did the research:

LIFE IN IRAQ:

During the past few weeks, I have done some careful research into what is happening in Iraq.

I have discovered that 47 countries have re-established their embassies there. The current Iraq government employs 1.2 million Iraqis. More than 3,100 schools have been renovated and 364 are being rehabilitated, with 263 under construction. Twenty universities and 46 institutes are operating. Some 4.3 million Iraqi children were enrolled in primary schools by the end of 2005.

The Iraqi police force has more than 55,000 fully trained and equipped officers and there are five police academies producing 3,500 new officers every eight weeks.

There are at least 1,190,000 mobile-phone subscribers. There is a fully independent media network of 75 radio stations, 180 newspapers and 10 television stations.

Much normal life is going on, although we rarely hear about it.

Maurice is right, we don’t hear about it. Why do you suppose that is?

What’s your favorite statistic? I like the almost-two million cell phone users. In my own life, I loathe the darn things, but to think of a country like Iraq being able to communicate so openly… yeah, the MSM naysayers will remind you that some are being used to set off explosives and for other nefarious, murderous projects. But the overwhelming and vast majority of calls are from or to Ali Whomever, talking to his wife, finding out what he’s supposed to pick up on the way home. Iraqis are enjoying the fundamental pleasures of routine lives. To quote the song from the Wallflowers:

You’d have a wonderful day
If you could see how lucky you are…

One thing Maurice didn’t mention was the incredible rate of building, refurbishing and rehabbing medical facilities across the country. There are more than three hundred in the last two years…

Someone start humming “Movin’ On Up.”

 
Oh, every once in awhile, when you’re just going along thinking of nothing in particular, out of the blue — a gift. A real gift for no reason at all. Just like that, poof! Here you are!

So it was recently. A reader, obviously noting the drool marks on my post about Scandinavian goodies, took pity on me and sent —oh, so graciously sent — a gift certificate to buy some Danish goodies at Amazon.

And guess what they had: pâté ! Made in Denmark, no less.

In generations gone by, my paternal ancestors owned Donnelly’s in Ireland. I’m told it was famous for its ham and sausages and pork goods. Members of the family went to Denmark to learn how to make it correctly. As a result they prospered.

And now I have my very own Danish pâté, to share or not…as luck would have it, my doctor wants me to eat lots of protein and suggested canned meat and fish.

Iris must have been listening, because up popped that blue Amazon gift card on my screen. As one of my favorite theologians is fond of saying, “isn’t God wonderful?” (to which, when I had said it once too often, the Baron’s Boy replied, “sometimes He is, sometimes He isn’t).

Thank you, Iris. And my doctor thanks you. And the Baron thinks you’re cool.

 
Brian C. Anderson, author of South Park Conservatives, has an essay in this quarter’s City Journal. If his premises are correct, it is chilling to consider the conclusions.

In The Plot to Shush Rush and O’ Reilly , Mr. Anderson makes the claim that if the Left has its way, conservative radio and other media — including blogs — will either be severely regulated or banished from the public forum.

The rise of alternative media—political talk radio in the eighties, cable news in the nineties, and the blogosphere in the new millennium—has broken the liberal monopoly over news and opinion outlets. The Left understands acutely the implications of this revolution, blaming much of the Democratic Party’s current electoral trouble on the influence of the new media’s vigorous conservative voices. Instead of fighting back with ideas, however, today’s liberals quietly, relentlessly, and illiberally are working to smother this flourishing universe of political discourse under a tangle of campaign-finance and media regulations. Their campaign represents the most sustained attack on free political speech in the United States since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. (emphasis added)

Mr. Anderson places the blame directly on the McCain-Feingold monstrosity that is continuing to spawn its ill-conceived and illegitimate grotesqueries whose sole raison d’être is to stifle the free expression of ideas. As we continue down the slippery slope to enforced silence we ought at least to look behind to see the forces determined to shove us there.

They include the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Ford Foundation, and, George – of course – Soros’ Open Society Institute. If Soros has his way, the open society will go the way of the dodo bird.

And here’s a bit of research you probably didn’t know:

Campaign-finance reform has a squeaky-clean image, but the dirty truth is that this speech-throttling legislation is partly the result of a hoax perpetrated by a handful of liberal foundations, led by the venerable Pew Charitable Trusts. New York Post reporter Ryan Sager exposed the scam when he got hold of a 2004 videotape of former Pew official Sean Treglia telling a roomful of journalists and professors how Pew and other foundations spent years bankrolling various experts, ostensibly independent nonprofits (including the Center for Public Integrity and Democracy 21), and media outlets (NPR got $1.2 million for “news coverage of financial influence in political decision-making”)—all aimed at fooling Washington into thinking that Americans were clamoring for reform, when in truth there was little public pressure to “clean up the system.” “The target group for all this activity was 535 people in Washington,” said Treglia matter-of-factly, referring to Congress. “The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot—that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform.”

In other words, we’ve been had.

Want to know what is in the works for blogs? According to Mr. Anderson’s scenario, it’s ugly:

Campaign-finance reform now has the blogosphere in its crosshairs. When the Federal Election Commission wrote specific rules in 2002 to implement McCain-Feingold, it voted 4 to 2 to exempt the Web. After all, observed the majority of three Republicans and one Democrat (the agency divides its seats evenly between the two parties), Congress didn’t list the Internet among the “public communications”—everything from television to roadside billboards—that the FEC should regulate.

Further, “the Internet is virtually a limitless resource, where the speech of one person does not interfere with the speech of anyone else,” reasoned Republican commissioner Michael Toner.

“Not so fast,” say these “reformers”:

…when the chief House architects of campaign-finance reform, joined by McCain and Feingold, sued—claiming that the Internet was one big “loophole” that allowed big money to keep on corrupting—a federal judge agreed, ordering the FEC to clamp down on Web politics. Then-commissioner Bradley Smith and the two other Republicans on the FEC couldn’t persuade their Democratic colleagues to vote to appeal.

The FEC thus has plunged into what Smith calls a “bizarre” rule-making process that could shackle the political blogosphere. This would be a particular disaster for the Right, which has maintained its early advantage over the Left in the blogosphere, despite the emergence of big liberal sites like Daily Kos. Some 157 of the top 250 political blogs express right-leaning views, a recent liberal survey found. Reaching a growing and influential audience—hundreds of thousands of readers weekly (including most journalists) for the top conservative sites—the blogosphere has enabled the Right to counter the biases of the liberal media mainstream. Without the blogosphere, Howell Raines would still be the New York Times’s editor, Dan Rather would only now be retiring, garlanded with praise—and John Kerry might be president of the U.S., assuming that CBS News had gotten away with its last-minute falsehood about President Bush’s military service that the diligent bloggers at PowerLine, LittleGreenFootballs, and other sites swiftly debunked.

Yes, that is what happened and that’s what the Democrats want to smother, as quickly and as quietly as possible.

If the Baron is correct, then entities like Pajamas Media will protect lone bloggers from the worst of the extremes of this execrable legalistic strong-arm thuggishness. Further, if he’s correct, then let a thousand Pajamas Media enterprises bloom. We will need them all to protect ourselves.

Go read the rest. See how they plan to cage O’Reilly and Limbaugh. It’s not pretty, but at least you’re prepared. If the media since 9/11 have done nothing else, they have taught us to see that they are not prepared to act in America’s interest unless it co-incides with its own prejudices. Have you noticed how seldom our interests and theirs happen to intersect?

Lovers of liberty should expose calls to restore the Fairness Doctrine for the fraudulent power-grab that they plainly are. And the Right, in particular, needs to understand how much it has benefited from a deregulated media universe. It should be confident that it has the right ideas, and that when it gets the chance to present them directly to the American people—as the new media have allowed it to do—it will win the debate. [emphasis added]

City Journal , Winter 2006

This is hilarious. I have no idea where it originated, but I got it at The Lone Voice.

Do you suppose the Lego people have a sense of humor?

Update: Reader DC writes from the Netherlands to say that the Mohammed/Lego image was originally posted on a Dutch blog called Retecool.

WARNING to readers who are easily offended, or have weak stomachs, or are averse to grotesque images, or are from The Common Room: you may not want to click this link to Retecool.

However, I found many highly amusing Mohammed cartoons there. The sight gags were clear, but the jokes in Dutch were hard to make out.

point cursor on picture

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *Hat tip: Grouchy Old Cripple

 
There has to be some limit to the idiocy of diplo-double speak. Whatever that limit is, Kofi passed it so long ago you can’t even look back and see it anymore.

Today, he lectured President Bush after a private meeting and in front of reporters —

…not to “escalate” tensions over Iran’s nuclear ambitions because the world wants to “find a way out of this crisis.”

“We need to be able to resolve it, and I hope there will be no steps taken to escalate this approach,” Mr. Annan told the president at the end of a meeting in the Oval Office.

It is not reorted whether Bush bitch-slapped him before or after Annan the Ass made this crapulous statement to waiting reporters. However, Scott McClellan got in his licks:

White House press secretary Scott McClellan later railed against Iran without escalating the administration’s rhetoric.

“Iran has shown that they can’t be trusted with nuclear technology because they have hidden their activities for some two decades,” he said. “They failed to comply with their international obligations.”

The meeting came as Iran announced that it was postponing a planned resumption of negotiations with Russia and also would restart its uranium enrichment.

The Moscow talks, which had been designed to assuage world concerns about the Islamic republic’s intentions by having Russia enrich uranium for Tehran, had been scheduled to resume Thursday.

“We support the proposal that was offered by Russia,” Mr. McClellan said. “But what you see coming from the regime is continued defiance of the world, a continued disregard for their international obligations and a continued thumbing of their nose to what the world has demanded.”

Or, as Goesh said so well in a recent comment:

For sure the world we know will be forever altered once Iran is armed with nukes. They have immense energy contracts with China. Once China has its 3 Gorge dam completed, it will have 9 times the electrical output of Hoover dam. It will go mostly to industrial development. Relatively decent products made with very cheap labor and no peripheral overhead costs like social security and workmans comp and unemployment, no OSHA, no EPA, no Human Rights and Cultural Diversity watch-dogs that a society must pay for. The 3 Gorge dam will enable China to project naval force via carriers. They will resist, possibly even with the threat of force, anything that threatens their access to Iran’s energy reserves. they fear a major disruption if force is used and Iran knows this and will exploit it. China holds billions of US dollars as well. The US reached its apex and 9/11 was the start of our decline. Iran with nukes only hastens the decline. Once armed and the cash flowing in, they can export terrorism and disruption like we can’t imagine. Hell, they can set up large training camps right on their borders and there ain’t a damn thing can be done about it. It’s like the thug that shows up for a street fight with a sawed-off shotgun and everyone else has brass knuckles, pretending to be tough. But be of good cheer – you can still have it your way at McDondalds. Ain’t it grand being free?

I think instead of McDonald’s it will be more like the Dali Lama’s hotdog: “make me one with everything.”

If only someone had the wisdom to tape Annan’s mouth shut permanently.

 
You know how those Italians love to dress well. Custom-designed clothing is nothing unusual. However…

Roberto Calderoli, a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League Party in Italy, seems to be leaning American in his new attire. According to EITB, the Basque Information Channel, Calderoli has had some T-shirts designed and is wearing them for all to see. They are, of course, the Mohammed Bomb-Head image, done tastefully on a black background.

Not only is he wearing them, he’s handing them out to whomever wants one, and he has something to say about the cartoon situation.

According to Ansa, the Italian news agency, Calderoli doesn’t think much of the offended hysteria currently being exhibited by Muslims in Italy. He thinks the time for dialogue is over:

“We have to put an end to this story that we can talk to these people. They only want to humiliate people. And what are we becoming? The civilization of melted butter?” Calderoli said.

One might be tempted to think that Calderoli could embarrass Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government. However, the PM himself caused his own small storm during the weekend when he said:

“I am the Jesus Christ of politics… I sacrifice myself for everyone.”

Hmmm… these Italian politicians have it all sewed up: melted butter and Jesus Christ comparisons.

Makes you wonder if the Italian Catholics are going to issue a fatwah against He-Who-Thinks-He-Is-Jesus. Oh. That’s right: westerners don’t bother with fatwahs. They issue Temporary Detaining Orders and have the poor soul evaluated by a psychiatrist.

Come to think of it, we have our own imams… except we call them shrinks. I prefer the shrink method, given its lower mortality rate.

You may purchase your own T shirt here. Tell them Allah sent you. And while you’re there, take a look at the proprietor’s hate mail.

Hat tips to Lizardoids: Thanks to Kilgore Trout for the original link to the Reuters story — though we siphoned through to a Reuter’s-free source, since al-Reuters causes the same reaction in me that pork does for Muslims. And thanks, also, to Peter Verkooijen for the link to the T shirts.

 
A link to Gates of Vienna turned up on a BBC message board, of all places. The topic? Ethnic humor. Someone had discovered our Palestinian jokes from last week, and, of course, missed the point:

it doesnt matter that the Irish are not actually stupid…that they maybe sharper than the English (the traditonal tellers of the Irish joke)in many instances. what matters is that the English have historically had all the power in that relationship and have been able to control the propaganda, the stereotype, and tell jokes at the expense of the other…i donno whether Israelis tell Palestinian jokes but give them another few hundred years of subjugation (as the Irish have experienced)then i’m sure the Palestinians will be making jokes against themselves also.

by the way i did find some Palestinian jokes all told by Americans…all with the punchline “BOOM” you should see this:

gatesofvienna.blogsp…

i sometimes wonder what it would take to make good Christian American kids in to suicide bombers…not very much i think…

i dont know much about Newfoundland or ‘Newfie’ jokes, infact i dont know much about Canadian humor i gather that Newfoudlanders are a bit disenfranchised so i geuss its natural they are the butt of jokes…

Oh, yeah! Those kids down at the youth group at our church can hardly wait to strap on the ol’ bomb-belt and walk into the local gay bar. Definitely.

There are so many things that one could say about this wonderful batch of cant that I simply don’t know where to start.

I guess the first thing to do is to tell a joke at the expense of a disenfranchised group:

Q: Why do Americans do it doggy-style?
A: So they can watch TV.

Do you ever get the feeling that people like these BBC folks really don’t get the point of humor? I mean, they see other people laughing at things, they hear the jokes, and then they knit their brows, trying to figure out why all these people around them are making strange loud whooping noises and wiping their eyes.

If they’re intelligent, they learn to simulate a sense of humor and laugh at the right places, using the habitual joke-telling cues to determine where those places are. But they don’t think anything is really funny.

Oh, sure, I laughed when my little brother fell down the stairs and split his head open, but I was a kid then! I’ve outgrown childish things.

And now they know that humor is really just about oppressing people, a way for the powerful to express their dominance at the expense of the powerless. Now they get the joke! At last!

The hermeneutic protocols governing this schema of humor are quite complex:

I don’t know if jokes about another culture are always the result of having power. New Zealanders tell lots of jokes about Australians, but would feel they were No 2 in that relationship as far as power goes. Maori tell jokes about themselves, but Pakeha are a bit sensitive about this sort of thing and would worry they were being racist. (And a lot of them would feel Maori had more power than them anyway.) Now that I think about it, it seems to be opposite (re power) here. I could tell jokes about Aucklanders but I’m not sure they would feel so comfortable with jokes about rural people. (Sort of along the lines of hitting you when you’re down.) Though most of our successful homegrown comedy programmes feature rural hicks to some degree or other. Quite often getting the better of city people, though.

Did that make it clearer?

There’s lots more in the same thread. Here’s another little taste, from a poster called Sean:

thanks again Caro…i wasnt seriously requesting a hunchback joke (there are many to be found online)…as a hunchback myself i’ve never met any other hunchbacks who tell jokes about themselves but until the 1980s such was on the daily repetetoir England humor along, ofcourse, with all the other usual recipients of racist jokes…i take the point about the power relationship, and it is useful to have the weapon of humor against the culturally dominant. i say English humor because so much of it seemed to be at the expense of the Irish, Welsh, and Scots which are the posits for ‘rural hicks’ that it couldnt rightly be called British.

Sean and Caro, I’ll let you in on a little secret: humor often targets people who are one-down because people who are one-down are usually suffering.

At the risk of violating my own moral tenets, I’ll explain the two primary components of humor: (1) surprise, and (2) suffering (preferably somebody else’s).

Hence the old British joke from my youth: So I says to the man with no legs at the bus stop, “How yer gettin’ on, then?”

And to round off this appallingly politically-incorrect diatribe, a joke of my own construction:

A club-footed Eritrean lesbian dwarf walks into a bar and orders a schnapps.

The bartender hands her the drink and says, “We don’t get many club-footed Eritrean lesbian dwarves in here.”

The club-footed Eritrean lesbian dwarf pulls out a .357 Magnum, drills the bartender right between the eyes, and says, “That’ll teach you to wield your oppressive patriarchal racist homophobic ableism at the expense of the powerless and disenfranchised!”

HA! HA! HA!

 
On The John Batchelor Show Monday evening, John Loftus said that Iran had “crossed a red line today.”

It is believed that they have solved some of the technical problems with an array of centrifuges since it was today that they began firing up part of the large cascade of spinning centrifuges which — if they are able to solve the technical glitches — will begin the process of turning uranium hexafluoride into enriched uranium. This decision violates all the IAEA mandates and will mean the ire of the U.S. and the U.N.

Meanwhile, Iran has also postponed its meeting with Russia regarding the nuclear facility at Brushehr, which Iran has built under an agreement with the Russian government. The deal was to have been that this facility would generate energy and the spent rods, which would be left over, would be returned to Russia. However, since the postponement of the March meeting in Russia, that plan has fallen through.

There is no use for spent rods from nuclear reactors except to make nuclear weapons.

So in addition to having at the helm of the state a certifiable nutjob, Iran now has:

1. Russia angry and suspicious because of the double-cross on the Brushehr facility, and
2. the concern of the United States because of their start on manufacturing their own enriched uranium, thus violating the IAEA mandates.

Do you think they care? Look what international ire earned for North Korea while Bill Clinton and China stood by. Do you think George Bush and Russia are going to have a different outcome with Iran?

What could either country use as leverage?

It looks as though what Nazi Germany, with its might and astonishing efficiency, could not accomplish, will be finalized by Persians.

That is beyond sad; it is unbearable.

 
Here you have it, hot off the presses of the Egyptian newspaper Al Multaqa Al Dawly. Take that, you Danish ham-makers. We’ll show you how clever our humor is. Make light of Mohammed, will you? Well, your monarch is a belly dancer, so there. And if that doesn’t shame you, why we’ll quit importing your food and start making our own for a change. Which we might be able to manage if we could find a goat — besides Denmark, that is. Obviously someone has to be the goat. Your turn, Queenie!

Or, as The Sandmonkey put it:

You know, in terms of retaliatory humor, we-muslims and arabs- are way way behind. We are not imaginative in how we make fun of who makes fun of us. I mean, look at this picture of the Queen of Denmark. Oooh, Queen’s head on the body of a belly dancer, that’s funn…nahh…that’s lame. And if it’s supposed to be humiliating, it really isn’t, because the Danes make fun of their queen all the time, and sometimes in more graphic ways than this. And when they do put her head on someone else’s body, they make it look good and realistic. But then again, they probably use tools more advanced than scissors and glue.

The Danes will probably look at this and laugh, because, like, they have a sense of humor. No chips on their shoulders…

No chips yet, though there may be a few bits of shrapnel if the organizing troublemakers aren’t put out of business by the Middle Eastern governments who are permitting their embassy burns and flag stompings.

You have to wonder: in the lands of taqiyya and kitman, what is this show covering up? What is the real deal? The “Arab Street” doesn’t move about in frenzies of breaking and burning things without either orders to do so or permission to “channel their anger.”

What’s up here?

 
The Politics of CP and the Northeast Intelligence Network have teamed up to produce a report on the headquarters of Jamaat ul-Fuqra near Hancock, NY, and its front organization, “The Muslims of America”. CP has done his homework and Douglas J. Hagmann has done the legwork to produce this impressive compendium of surveillance evidence and background information.

The full report (in pdf format) is here.

The report includes a history of JF, covering territory that is well-known to regular Gates of Vienna readers. It reviews the history of JF and its founder, Sheikh Gilani, going into detail on the background of its violent adherents and their criminal activities here in the USA.

The account of the surveillance of the rural New York compound reminds me of our nearby Red House version, but on a much larger scale. The guard house, armed sentries, and nervous neighbors seem all too familiar.

Surveillance was conducted using a variety of methods and from various locations. It is important to note that there appears to be men who are designated to provide “security” for the compound. One male was posted inside the guard shack at the primary entrance, while others, walking in pairs and each armed with at least one rifle, appeared to watch the open perimeters of the encampment. The men were not in any type of uniform and except for the sentry inside of the guard shack, were not readily visible from any public vantage position.

At intermittent times during the covert surveillance, investigators observed numerous Black males, all appearing to range in age from 18-40, walking throughout the compound. At least two of these individuals were armed with rifles.

But this was the most chilling piece of information:

Men of Middle Eastern origin appear to be “frequent guests” of the encampment, many attired in traditional Islamic attire. Some appear to stay at the encampment for 3-4 days or longer. During periods of these visits, activity and security at the compound is noticeably heightened.

People who live nearby are understandably frightened. No one in a marked law enforcement vehicle, or wearing a recognizable law enforcement uniform, has ever been observed entering the compound.

If I lived nearby, I’d be nervous, too.

As one resident said, “We see children – small children run around over there when they should be in school. We hear bursts of gunfire all of the time, and we know that there is military like training going on there. Those people are armed and dangerous. We get nothing but menacing looks from the people who go in and out of the camp, and sometime they yell at us to mind our own business when we are just driving by. We don’t even dare to slow down when we drive by. They own this mountain and they know it, and there is nothing we can do about it but move, and we can’t even do that. Who wants to buy property next to that?”

See earlier Gates of Vienna posts (parts one, two, and three) for more information on the Jamaat ul-Fuqra compound in Red House, Virginia.

And for thorough investigative reporting, go to The Politics of CP and just keep scrolling.

 
We received an email the other day from Patrick Vidaud in London. He’s trying to organize a march for the support of free expression in Britain.

I am canvassing individuals and organisations to gather support for a march in London some time soon in defence of freedom of expression. I do not represent anyone other than myself. I am concerned, as no doubt are many others, that fear, dressed up as sensitivity, may tempt some in power to allow our most precious right to be circumscribed, to be eroded. We need to stand up, be counted and be seen.

The strength and survival of true democracy depends most of all on the free expression of ideas. All ideas. There cannot be any compromise on this. As Voltaire said to one of his foes “I despise your views but I am prepared to die for your right to express them”.

I am proposing the usual; a march on a weekend day from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square. Would you give your support to such a demonstration?

Patrick Vidaud, London.

To our UK readers: if you want to help out, email Mr. Vidaud at marchforfreespeech@googlemail.com. His blog is marchforfreeexpression.blogspot.com.

He also asked us, “And, while we’re at it, how about a corresponding US march?”

Well, how about it? Or do we have to wait until raging mobs torch our embassies about cartoons in our papers?

Oh, that’s right — none of the major dailies in this country has printed the cartoons yet…

 
Gates of Vienna has been getting credit (and links) for something that was said in the comments last week by Minh-Duc from State of Flux. We reproduced his comments in a later post, but Minh-Duc deserves the credit for his escape from Communism and his love of his adopted country.

Minh-Duc’s words are succinct and moving, and only he could have been the author.

As it turned out, he expanded his comment into a post on his own blog, State of Flux:

The demands [for an apology for the Mohammed cartoons] suggest a few things about those who demanded them. By asking the government of Denmark and Norway to punish the cartoonist and their publishers, the demanders have absolutely no regard for individual liberty. By asking the government of Denmark and Norway to apologize for the offense of private citizen, they believe that the state and the individuals are one and the same – this is the central value of facism. By boycotting Danish and Norwegian products, they believe that one member of the collective can be punished for the action of the other. This is the very same attitude that result in the barbaric gang rape of Mukhtar Mai.

Let not pretend that they seek to redress an insult to their religion. It is a mere pretext. They seek nothing less than our submission – our unconditional surrender to their rule. To them I say “bring it on.” I will not submit. I will not surrender. I will not be a dhimmi. I did not escape Communism to live under Sharia. You are prepared to die for your religion. I am prepared to die for my freedom.

Take note of the name: Minh-Duc.