Why I Won't Participate In 'Everybody Draw Mohammed ' Day

After Comedy Central censored a South Park episode that didn’t actually depict Mohamed, but made fun of the Islamoseethe over the subject, a number of people signed on to pick a specific date and intentionally draw an image of Mohammed.

My friend Bookworm has a fine post on the subject:

It’s a good idea, quite obviously, because modern Western society is predicated on free speech. Admittedly, there are gradations to that free speech, with America standing at the pinnacle of what is allowed and protected as an ordinary part of civil discourse. Speech becomes increasingly more regulated as one travels through other Western nations. Nevertheless, any nation that stands on the shoulders of the Enlightenment gives a nod to the importance of freely expressed ideas and information. When we give up free speech, we give up a significant part of our identity.

Lately, though, European nations and American TV stations have willingly abandoned any semblance of commitment to the notion of free speech. And what’s really dreadful about this practice is that it’s not even driven by the traditional rationale for speech restriction, which is to protect the ruling party from internal challenges to its control. Instead, this is a purely fear-based abandonment. It has nothing to do with principles or power. It is, instead, a craven desire to avoid screaming mobs wielding sharp swords.

The various Western nations (and American TV stations) engaged in cultural retreat dress it up as respect for the “other.” That respect, however, exists only because we fear that “other.” Sam Harris, in what is probably the most worthy article the Huffington Post has ever published — and one that I strongly urge you to read — gets to the heart of the matter. After discussing (1) Geert Wilder’s martyrdom at the hands of the Dutch political class for his film Fitna, a film that reveals how closely Islam tracks on Mohamed’s incendiary rhetoric, and (2) Kurt Westergaard’s life in hiding thanks to the very first Mohamed cartoons, Harris explains how Islam is gaming the West:

Wilders, like Westergaard and the other Danish cartoonists, has been widely vilified for “seeking to inflame” the Muslim community. Even if this had been his intention, this criticism represents an almost supernatural coincidence of moral blindness and political imprudence. The point is not (and will never be) that some free person spoke, or wrote, or illustrated in such a manner as to inflame the Muslim community. The point is that only the Muslim community is combustible in this way. The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.

There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for “racism” and “Islamophobia.”

When we play into this Islamic game — “We, your resident Muslims, promise to live up to our putative reputation for peace as long as you don’t exercise those of your freedoms that put us in a killing rage” — we give up the essence of who we are. We are no longer the heirs of Voltaire and the Enlightenment, of the Founders and the abolitionists. We are no longer free people. Instead, we are slaves to our fears, with our lives increasingly constrained by the random and irrational demands of small subsets of our western societies.

Most of what's written above has a real basis in truth. However, I will not be participating.

Gratuitously insulting Muslims in this particular fashion serves no purpose whatsoever. In fact, it merely reinforces the Islamist argument that Islam must ultimately triumph over the West and that all Muslims had better choose sides..even those few Muslims with perhaps only a tentative allegiance to Islam.

As you know, I gave up any notion of a 'moderate Islam' some time ago, based on the silence the Muslim world greeted events like Beslan, Mumbai, and attacks on non-Muslim civilians all over the world, from Nigeria, to Israel, to Britain, to the United States.

But it's also true that there are Muslims, especially in the West who are silent out of fear or social pressure and despise what Islam is coming to stand for. It's these Muslims who are under pressure to sign on to the Islamist's program, and a 'draw Mohammed' day only increases that pressure.

It's also a shot at the wrong target.

As I've noted before, just a short time after caving in to threats from Islamists, the moral cowards at Comedy Central announced a brand new show based on "JC," a half-hour show about Christ "wanting to escape the shadow of his powerful but apathetic father and live a regular life in New York City.

In the show, God is preoccupied with playing video games while Christ, the ultimate fish out of water, tries to adjust to life in the big city."

Nor is Comedy Central limited to harshly satirizing Christ and Christians. They feel perfectly free to indulge in some gutter level Jew hatred:

Currently appearing on Comedy Central's website is a game called "I.S.R.A.E.L. Attack!". The premise of this game has nothing to do with Israel and, as such, is nothing more than an insidious attempt at association. The game's introduction begins with a character who states:

You lied to me, Jew Producer

referring to a character who has failed to carry out a mission to destroy other child-like cartoon characters. If this piece of anti-Semitism isn't bad enough, a robot - the Intelligent Smart Robot Animation Eraser Lady - is sent to do the job that the Jew Producer failed to achieve.

The character openly calls the robot by its acronym - ISRAEL - and the association created by those behind this game is unmistakable - Israel the child killer.

The game then involves the robot destroying everything and everyone in its path, including children and animals.

TinyPic

The game is stil up on Comedy Central's website, although reportedly, they've removed the phrase, 'you lied to me Jew producer'.

Comedy Central feels perfectly free targeting Jews and Christians and is wary of offending Muslims even when it involves dhimmi submission to sharia for the same reason a lot of other media sources do - because there is no price they'll pay for offending Christians and Jews, but Muslims might just target you or your family ala' Theo Van Gogh or Salman Rushdie or bomb your studio.

Instead of putting energy into drawing a bunch of pictures of Mohammed, why not work to change that situation? Why not start a public boycott of Comedy Central,its parent corporation Viacom and most importantly their advertisers as an example to any other media company tempted to allow fear of Islamists to temper acceptable free expression?

Can you imagine the fall out if,instead of caricatures of Mohammed, Comedy Central's advertisers received a hundred or two hundred letters letting them know that unless they pulled their ads people would be not be patronizing their products?

Letting people like Comedy Central know that there is a price to pay for dhimmitude and selective bigotry strikes me as a much more productive outlet than gratuitously insulting Muslims.

-Selah-

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