Pamela Geller appeared yesterday on CNN to discuss what happened on Sunday in Garland, Texas. She gave a very thorough account of what her event was about, and the dangers America faces from jihad and sharia. After watching her mop the floor with her interlocutor during this interview, one can’t help but wonder whether Alisyn Camerota had had any briefing at all about Islamic religious doctrine and Islamic law:
Hat tip: Papa Whiskey.
Dr. Andrew Bostom: Educating CNN and Fox News About Pamela Geller and the Sharia Assault on Free Speech in Garland, Texas
Thank you, Pam Geller.
One has to call it what it is;
https://martienpennings.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/pamela-geller-is-not-truthful-enough/
I think that here is the point at which I have to criticize the entire program of “Mo-toons”, whether organized contests or individual efforts.
I am just not willing to kill anyone over a cartoon.
Mind you, I like cartoons quite a bit more than is considered socially acceptable for Western men. In fact, watching anime is largely how I’ve moderated my instinctive racial hatred of Japanese people, which just goes to show that, far from being willing to kill anyone over cartoons, I’m willing to let people live over cartoons. There is just something about enjoying a cartoon that helps you see the world in a more charming light.
But I’m not willing to kill anyone for saying they don’t like…oh, Aria (an anime about some girls working as tour guides in Neo-Valencia, which is a city on Mars, renamed Aqua after extensive terraforming, built by transporting the physical buildings of Venice from Earth–no, there is no real explanation of why this was considered necessary). It is a rather undramatic exploration of how nice it would be to live in a future with no war and no poverty…poverty being defined as the inability to afford interplanetary travel (including moving entire cities of historic buildings for no very compelling reason). I rather like it.
But I wouldn’t kill over it.
If, for some reason, the last copy of Aria were about to be dropped into an incinerator by some moral crusader who deemed it to violate some religious prohibition on the depiction of life on other planets (because of that weird martian animal which is certainly not a cat though it seems to have fooled the humans) or whatever, and the only way I could stop him was by shooting him with a high powered rifle, I wouldn’t take the shot. Sure, I would have tried to get hold of a copy for myself, but not by killing anyone. And I wouldn’t save the last copy in existence if the only way to do it was by almost certainly killing (or at least maiming) someone.
On the other hand, if some moral crusader came to confiscate my copy (which, after all, I had been clever enough to obtain for myself), I would refuse unless a very compelling argument was offered. And by “very compelling argument”, I definitely exclude any threats tendered against my own life or the lives of those close to me. Because the only thing that ‘argument’ would compel me to do is kill the people presenting that threat.
And of course this is the central problem with Islam. It isn’t that they don’t want us to make cartoons mocking Mohammad. There are plenty of Christians who don’t like cartoons mocking Jesus, and Jews who don’t like cartoons mocking their noses and hats. I have to say, I’ve enjoyed many an anime that portrayed Christianity or Western racial features and cultural mores in ways that were frankly offensive. Perhaps I should have picked one of them for my example, but I wanted to choose something that almost anyone would have real difficulty interpreting as offensive. The point being that, no matter how silly I might think it for someone to go on a moral crusade to rid the world of copies of Aria, I wouldn’t kill them over it.
I’m not willing to kill Muslims for being offended by cartoons depicting Mohammad in ways that are offensive…including offensive merely because they depict him at all.
What I’m willing to kill people over is their willingness to kill me and mine, and the reasons why are pretty secondary…as long as they apply to me. And I think that this is probably a common enough idea among the civilized that focusing on something that anyone can do, but most people wouldn’t anyway, leaves room for precisely the wedge that the apologists for Jihad are trying to drive here. They say that the event was insensitive and tasteless. Well, and so it was. I have several times considered drawing a Mo-toon, despite my lack of experience and skill in visual arts, but I never actually have, largely because I have a significant threshold for being insensitive and tasteless. I cannot draw something nuanced and artistic, so crude and blunt is my only stylistic option in drawing a cartoon.
I can accuse the Koran of being a direct violation as well as contradiction of the teachings of Mohammad, decry the practice of Sharia as being incompatible with Western Civilization, or call for the preaching of Koranic Islam to be legally considered prima facie evidence of criminal conspiracy. But for some reason this does not ‘go viral’ and result in death threats against me personally…possibly because these are all banal observations of the obvious. Or perhaps because devout Muslims aren’t generally literate enough to understand what I’m saying. But this doesn’t bother me.
Because I know if there weren’t anyone doing something more offensive to Islam, they’d be coming for me. But I think that not everyone does know this. I think that there are many people who think that, as long as they don’t draw offensive cartoons, Islam will leave them alone. Of course, it is nearly the opposite, it is because there are various artists to hunt down that Muslims have no time for beheading those who are merely insufficiently devout in their worship of Qutham, as we see very clearly whenever and wherever Muslims succeed in ridding themselves of everyone willing to actively take a stand against Islam. Ultimately, finding ‘infidels’ to behead is the only path to salvation in Koranic Islam, and if they run out of willing infidels then they just have to make due with unwilling infidels.
We have to find a way to make this point. Our opposition to Koranic Islam, in the form of Sharia, Jihad, or political correctness, is not so that we can laugh at drawings of Mohammad. Yes, I do laugh at the cartoons, but I’m not willing to kill anyone so I can laugh at cartoons (well, and if I were it wouldn’t help my argument to say so).
I’m willing to kill them because, if nobody kills them, they will kill everything good, beautiful, and interesting in the world. That might not include me personally, in fact it certainly doesn’t. But it does include a lot of things I’m willing to kill to protect.
Just tried to watch this video, and it has been shut down. What a surprise. [eye roll]