-The Media’s Main Bias is Anti-American
-10 countries where homosexuality may be punished by death
-Emerson on Fox’s Hannity: “No Go Zones and Sharia Courts…Europe is Finished.”
January 8th, 2015 By: John Hayward
Defiance is the opposite of submission. When submission is demanded, the only available options are absolute, unambiguous defiance, or some degree of compliance with the demand. Once you’re in compliance, only the degree of submission remains to be debated.
This is particularly true when the demand for submission concerns a core principle, a veritable pillar of civilization, such as the right to free speech. Few Americans understand just how atrophied freedom of speech has become around the world. Rarely do even our staunch allies embrace free speech to the same degree we do. Or, rather, the same degree we did. America’s commitment to free speech has unquestionably wavered over the past few years. We’re growing quite comfortable with the use of force to restrict speech. It’s usually not violent force, but it’s compulsion just the same. When Internet flash mobs can get people fired from their jobs, or cause them to break down and offer tearful public apologies and retractions for the expression of unacceptable ideas, free speech is under attack by tyranny.
It doesn’t matter if the tyrants think themselves righteous. They almost always do. It also doesn’t matter if the tyrants are self-appointed and lack the direct support of government officials. This is commonly misunderstood by those who brush off vigilante speech restrictions by saying, “Well, it’s not censorship or a First Amendment issue if the government isn’t involved.” Does anyone doubt that the Charlie Hebdo massacre was an assault on freedom of speech, an act of censorship, even though the government of France obviously did not sanction the attack?
Free speech is a principle, and no principle of such importance survives for very long unless the people hold it close to their hearts, allowing it to illuminate their decisions as individual citizens. They must reject demands for submission, whether those demands come from politicians or rabble-rousers, terrorists or “activists,” if they wish to remain free and independent. There is a difference between even the liveliest, most passionate argument and a demand for submission. The difference is that you are allowed to disagree with a passionate argument, without facing punitive consequences. Free people do not submit. It is their defining characteristic.
Once free people become comfortable with submission, it is a bargain they never stop making. The marketplace for the sale of freedom never closes. Neither does the black market for dealing in stolen freedom. Every aggressor who seeks submission knows that he might not get it all at once, and that’s okay. He waits eagerly for the first cracks in the armor of freedom, the first small concessions. These concessions are often disguised as stands on principle by the more literate breed of coward. They’ll write extensively about how a particular demand for submission really wasn’t so unreasonable after all, and really we shouldn’t support provocative speech that insults the deeply-held convictions of those who are prone to violence – why, that’s just like shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, and we all know that isn’t protected free speech, right? And anyway, that movie was just a dumb stoner comedy, and those cartoons weren’t very good, and the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam…
Submission is also concealed through false moral equivalence, including the abject idiocy of comparing murderous terror attacks with the polite objections of non-violent people who feel insulted or profaned in some way. Shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attack, the UK Guardian ran a bizarre piece that started by arguing the ban on depictions of Mohammed is a misunderstanding of Islamic law – which a large number of Muslims, including those willing to do murder over it, apparently don’t understand as well as Western liberals – and moved on to this classic bit of moral equivalence:
Charlie Hebdo, the French magazine whose offices were attacked by gunmen in Paris on Wednesday, has published several controversial cartoons portraying the prophet, some in pornographic poses. Last October, it portrayed the jihadis of Isis as being opposed to Islam by displaying an image of a masked man cutting the throat of his kneeling, turbanned victim, who is saying: “I am the prophet, you brute.”
The killer replies: “Shut your mouth, you infidel.” The cartoon was captioned: “If Muhammad returned …”
Observant Muslims anywhere would be angered by such images. That is especially true of fundamentalist Salafis, who adhere to traditions laid down in 7th-century Arabia, or of the small minority who hold to the jihadi-takfiri world view espoused by Isis and al-Qaida. Their doctrines permit the killing of so-called apostates. But devout Sunni Muslims of all stripes avoid visual depictions of Muhammad or other prophets such as Moses or Abraham.
Islam is not unique. Judaism forbids the use of “graven images” and Christianity has at times frowned on visual representations of sacred figures, allowing only the cross to be depicted in churches.
Can anyone spot the hole in that thinking? Yes, you there in the back of the class? You say Jews and Christians haven’t been running around and murdering people in terrorist attacks because their religious strictures have been offended by non-believers? That does seem like a rather important difference, doesn’t it? Let me phrase it another way: only Islam is actively interested in securing the submission of non-believers to its religious laws. Even a rabbi who writes a fiery op-ed in a newspaper calling on everyone to refrain from throwing graven images around is not seeking submission, but rather attempting persuasion. A Christian church that allows only crosses to be displayed within its walls is enforcing a restriction upon itself. Get back to me when such churches begin killing those who disagree, or blowing up churches that display images of Jesus and the saints.
You get this load of bunkum from cowards who are interested in temporarily masking their act of submission to violent demands. They’ll actually seek praise for their enlightened courage while pretending to endorse universal religious tolerance… but when the spotlight fades and it’s back to business as usual, there’s only one set of religious laws obeyed by newsroom atheists, only one image they will not display, only one group they refuse to insult, only one historical figure they refer to as “The Prophet” (as CNN calls Mohammed in its official guidelines for not displaying the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, although they said they’ll consider allowing wide shots of Parisian crowds, as long as close-ups that would clearly display the forbidden toons are avoided.)
For its part, the Associated Press pumped out billowing clouds of superheated gas about its universal commitment to avoiding provocative images as the reason for banning the Charlie Hebdo cartoons… while simultaneously selling photos of a crucifix submerged in urine, until they were caught out as frauds by incredulous bloggers, and hastily pulled “Piss Christ” off the digital shelves.
USA Today actually ran an op-ed from jihadi cleric Anjem Choudary – who once instructed his flock to think of British welfare payments as a jizya tax on infidels, a “jihad seeker’s allowance” – in which he explained that all this machine-gun and firebomb unpleasantness could be avoided if Western governments would simply censor everything Islamic law finds objectionable:
Within liberal democracies, freedom of expression has curtailments, such as laws against incitement and hatred.
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.
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?
It is time that the sanctity of a Prophet revered by up to one-quarter of the world’s population was protected.
Sounds like Choudary agrees with Barack Obama that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Note that the word “must” conveys an absolute non-negotiable demand. Obama didn’t say the future probably should not belong to people who “slander” a man who has been dead for centuries.
There’s also a bit of opportunism in the Left’s response to Islamist demands for submission. They love the opportunity to drag out favored bogeymen from decades or centuries past – Jerry Falwell, the “Last Temptation of Christ” controversy, thirty-year-old abortion-clinic bombings, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, whatever – and compare them to murderous Islamist terrorists. If submission comes with an opportunity to score a few cheap political points against hated domestic enemies, it’s much easier for the Left to get on its knees.
That’s exactly where you are right now, if you’re a media organization refusing to run the cartoons that brought slimy killers into the Charlie Hebdo offices, and got French police officers executed in the street, including a casual rifle shot to the head as a terrorist strolled past the still-twitching body of a bullet-riddled cop. If you won’t show the cartoons, you’re not “standing with” Charlie Hebdo, or anyone else. You’re on your knees.
The only acceptable response to fascists like Choudary is absolute and complete defiance. That’s why Barack Obama was so far off-base, with deadly consequences, when he gave that disgusting “future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” speech. Defiance is what the world needed to hear from the President of the United States, whose First Amendment secures freedom of speech and forbids the State establishment of religion. Your job right now is clear, Media of the Free World: you need to get those Charlie Hebdo cartoons in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Make them among the most familiar images in the world today. Honor those who stood up for free speech and free thought, and were brutally murdered for their defiance.
If you don’t defy conquerors, then you are conquered. It can start small. Those who would conquer mighty nations know that it has to start small. They can be patient and wait for submission to take root, once defiance is no longer on the table.
Let me make it simple for anyone in the left-wing media who still doesn’t get it. Murdered editor Stephane Charbonnier said, “I don’t blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don’t live under Koranic law.” He’s also famed for saying he would rather die on his feet than live on his knees. Those are expressions of defiance.
This is what submission looks like:
That’s the New York Daily News running a photo of Charbonnier holding up one of the cartoons he was killed over… and blurring out the toon, lest they give offense to his killers.
http://www.redstate.com/2015/01/08/defiance-submission/
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American Left: The Paris Attacks Aren’t About Islam
Attacks Aren’t About Islam
Jan 08, 2015 by Guy Benson
Let’s begin with former DNC Chairman Howard Dean, who intoned that the Charlie Hebdo shooters are “about as Muslim as I am” on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:
You know, this is a chronic problem. I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They’re about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect for anybody else’s life, that’s not what the Koran says. Europe has an enormous radical problem. I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it’s a cult.
Kindly ignore the shouts of “Allahu Akbar” and professions of “avenging the prophet.” That’s cult talk, and it has nothing to do with Islam, Dean says. He’s echoing President Obama’s insistence that the Islamic State, or ISIS, “is not Islamic.” Our colleague, ahem, Allahpundit, notes that the politically-correct stance on such matters has evolved from the aspirational “Islamic extremists are a tiny fraction of a peaceful religion” to the delusional “these people have nothing to do with Islam whatsoever.” He lays the snark on thick while poking a few holes in this sanitized departure from reality: “Sure, they may swear by the Koran, and sure, most of them come from the Middle East, and sure, they act with plenty of moral support from Salafist clerics based in the same country where Mecca and Medina are located, but hey — that doesn’t make them Islamic.” Right. Most Americans recognize that it’s grossly unfair to pass judgment on all, or even most, worldwide Muslims based on the medieval attitudes and violent tendencies embraced by more radical elements of the faith. Unnerving evidence exists, however, that the ‘extremists’ aren’t necessarily the marginalized faction we’d like to imagine them to be. See: This 2006 poll of British Muslims I linked yesterday, and this 2013 worldwide survey of Muslims conducted by Pew. We can quibble and debate about how small a minority must be to fit the definition of “extremists,” but we must reject the dangerous and fanciful notion that Islamist terrorism has zero connection to Islam. Vox’s Ezra Klein surveys the evidence and pronounces yesterday’s rampage not a function of the perpetrators’ religion:
What happened today, according to current reports, is that two men went on a killing spree. Their killing spree, like most killing sprees, will have some thin rationale. Even the worst villains believe themselves to be heroes. But in truth, it was unprovoked slaughter. The fault lies with no one but them and their accomplices. Their crime isn’t explained by cartoons or religion. Plenty of people read Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons and managed to avoid responding with mass murder. Plenty of people follow all sorts of religions and somehow get through the day without racking up a body count. The answers to what happened today won’t be found in Charlie Hebdo’s pages. They can only be found in the murderers’ sick minds.
No larger truths to see here, folks. CNN commentator Sally Kohn hopped aboard this train early, erecting straw men faster than they could be knocked down. One of her many nuggets:
Sally Kohn ✔ @sallykohn
Since 9/11, right-wing extremists (incl anti-abortion, anti-gov) have killed more Americans than Islamic extremists — http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/14/opinion/bergen-sterman-kansas-shooting/ …
9:09 AM – 7 Jan 2015
She links to a CNN op/ed that cites a New America Foundation analysis purporting to prove this very point. John Sexton tweeted a strong piece he wrote criticizing the methodology of the study, summarized in this tweet:
John Sexton @verumserum
. @peterbergencnn’s argument: If you ignore 9/11, attacks on Americans abroad and honor killings–Muslim extremism not so bad.
9:40 AM – 7 Jan 2015
Comparatively, at least. Kohn, as is occasionally her wont, later descended into bizarre moral equivalencies, arguing (I think) at one point that Islam isn’t as intolerant of homosexuals as Christians, or something:
Guy Benson @guypbenson
QED MT @sallykohn:Ottoman Caliph decriminalized homosexuality in 1858, Christians in Uganda passed anti-gay law in 2014
1:08 PM – 7 Jan 2015
While it’s no doubt true that egregious violations of gay people’s human rights have been — and in some cases, continue to be — carried out in the name of Christianity, there is no comparison here. Check out this chart, and see if you can spot the pattern. And then try to extract yourself from the rabbit hole I’ve led you down. We should all be able to agree that holding the horrendous actions of killers against larger groups with whom they’re associated is almost always unjustifiable and wrong. We can lock arms and agree that a majority of Muslims across the world do not condone what happened in Paris yesterday, or in Iraq and Syria over the last year, or in London in 2005, or in Madrid in 2004, or in Bali in 2002, or in New York City and Washington in 2001, etc. But those important caveats should not give way to the mindless repetition of a flawed mantra in order to shield a politically correct narrative against unpleasant realities. This form of denial is frightening and self-defeating. Left unchecked, it’s societal suicide.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2015/01/08/american-left-the-paris-attacks-arent-about-islam-n1939943/
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The Media’s Main Bias is Anti-American
January 8th, 2015 By: Leon H. Wolf (Diary)
Kudos to the Islamic terrorists yesterday who shot up the Charlie Hebdo offices yesterday for doing so in such a way that the media could not pretend that they were not Muslim or that their belief in radical Islam was not the primary motivating factor for their actions. Having been robbed of their normal playbook of refusing to use Islamic names or to report that terrorists were Muslims or motivated by Islam at all, the media has instead been forced back to their second-line garrison for this type of story – which is to say, to express concern about whether Muslims now face a rising tide of “Islamophobia” – as opposed to concern about whether non-Muslims face a rising tide of being-beheaded-or-shot-to-death-phobia.
Here is a useful thought experiment. Pretend that yesterday’s French terrorists were not radical Muslims but instead members of the Westboro Baptist Church. How many news stories would a) omit their religious affiliation or b) express concern that members of the Westboro Baptist Church now faced anger and discrimination in their community? Of course the answer is zero, and in fact we could expect a steady stream of stories that examined the exact opposite and laid out in painstaking depth how the twisted religious beliefs of the Westboro Baptist Church members and the poisonous rhetoric of church leaders directly led to this abominable event. Nightline and 20/20 would doubtless send reporters to Kansas for lengthy pieces complete with videos of the scary rhetoric to which the Westboro members are regularly exposed.
The most absurd thing, of course, is that the main reason Westboro is (justly) hated by the media is their rhetoric on homosexuality and homosexuals – rhetoric which is functionally indistinguishable from radical forms of Islam from which these attacks spring. In fact, the main difference between the two is that Westboro Baptist Church members do not actually kill gay people whereas hundreds of gays and lesbians are killed in Muslim dominated countries every year – in fact, the main difference between a “moderate” Muslim country and an “extremist” one where gay people are concerned is that in a “moderate” Muslim country the government looks the other way while private citizens stone gay people whereas in an “extremist” one the government does the stoning or hanging themselves.
On a surface level, the media’s refusal to engage the ugly underbelly of Islam is baffling, especially in the context of a story where press freedom is directly at stake. So called moderate Muslims like Anjem Choudary spent all day yesterday patiently explaining on twitter that insulting the prophet should be illegal and that any Westerner who does so just has to understand that if they get killed for doing so, they had it coming. And it’s too easy to chalk this up to cowardice in the face of intimidation. After all, the press has a lengthy history of coddling and treating brutal and totalitarian regimes – regimes that systematically oppress freedoms of expression that the press ostensibly stands for – as long as those regimes meet one condition: they must be opposed to the interests of America.
From the Soviets throughout the cold war, to Mao, to Che, to Hugo Chavez, to modern totalitarian Muslim dictators, if you oppress your own people BUT publicly hate and humiliate America, you will either be portrayed by the press as misunderstood, treated with kid gloves, or not mentioned at all. But if you are an autocratic dictator who is actually on the side of American interests abroad you will be the subject of numerous media exposes that lament the terrible plight of human rights in your country. A comparison of the way Augusto Pinochet and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi were covered by the media of their day with the way Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe are covered today reveals that you can get away with quite a lot in the Western media as long as you strike a public anti-American pose.
And with respect to the current crop of radical Islamic terrorists, surely even the most dense member of the Western media must understand by now that if they had their way, freedom of the press as we know it would not exist and many journalists would be either jailed or executed – either for what they have written or for how they choose to live their personal lives, or, you know, for being Jewish. And yet, even these facts are not enough to cause them to treat radical Islamics with the contempt reserved for the Westboro Baptist Church freaks or to honestly shine a spotlight on the extent to which radical Islam has taken hold even in Western countries (particularly in Europe) or to frankly report on the doctrine that is taught there.
And the only possible reason is this: however bad and offensive their doctrine is, at least they are opposed to America. And that trumps all.
http://www.redstate.com/2015/01/08/medias-main-bias-anti-american/
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Here are the 10 countries where homosexuality may be punished by death
February 24, 2014 By Terri Rupar
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni today signed a law that imposes a 14-year prison sentence for homosexual acts — and life sentences for those found guilty of “aggravated homosexuality.” A measure imposing the death penalty was removed from an earlier version of the bill.
Homosexuality was already illegal in Uganda, as it is in 37 other African countries. Though the death penalty was removed from Uganda’s law, it’s a potential punishment elsewhere, including parts of Nigeria, Mauritania and Sudan.
(Last month, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan signed a measure similar to Uganda’s into law; a few weeks later, a mob pulled 14 young men from their beds and assaulted them, screaming about cleansing their neighborhood of gay people. )
Here are the 10 countries where homosexuality may be punishable by death:
Yemen: According to 1994 penal code, married men can be sentenced to death by stoning for homosexual intercourse. Unmarried men face whipping or one year in prison. Women face up to seven years in prison.
Iran: In accordance with sharia law, homosexual intercourse between men can be punished by death, and men can be flogged for lesser acts such as kissing. Women may be flogged.
Iraq: The penal code does not expressly prohibit homosexual acts, but people have been killed by militias and sentenced to death by judges citing sharia law.
Mauritania: Muslim men engaging in homosexual sex can be stoned to death, according to a 1984 law. Women face prison.
Nigeria: Federal law classifies homosexual behavior as a felony punishable by imprisonment, but several states have adopted sharia law and imposed a death penalty for men. A law signed in early January makes it illegal for gay people countrywide to hold a meeting or form clubs.
Qatar: Sharia law in Qatar applies only to Muslims, who can be put to death for extramarital sex, regardless of sexual orientation.
Saudi Arabia: Under the country’s interpretation of sharia law, a married man engaging in sodomy or any non-Muslim who commits sodomy with a Muslim can be stoned to death. All sex outside of marriage is illegal.
Somalia: The penal code stipulates prison, but in some southern regions, Islamic courts have imposed Sharia law and the death penalty.
Sudan: Three-time offenders under the sodomy law can be put to death; first and second convictions result in flogging and imprisonment. Southern parts of the country have adopted more lenient laws.
United Arab Emirates: Lawyers in the country and other experts disagree on whether federal law proscribes the death penalty for consensual homosexual sex or only for rape. In a recent Amnesty International report, the organization said it was not aware of any death sentences for homosexual acts. All sexual acts outside of marriage are banned.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/02/24/here-are-the-10-countries-where-homosexuality-may-be-punished-by-death/
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MB Obama at UN: “The future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam”, Intolerance, itself, is a form of violence.
Emerson on Fox’s Hannity: “No Go Zones and Sharia Courts…Europe is Finished.”
Paris Shooting Official Story Keeps Changing By The Second
UKIP Nigel Farage on Fox News – Responding to the Paris attack?
http://www.infowars.com/paris-shooting-official-story-keeps-changing-by-the-second/
I am Charlie!
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Related
http://www.redstate.com/2015/01/08/moral-relativists-troll-charliehebdo-attacks/
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2015/01/07/obama-speech-on-paris-shooting-n1939826/
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/danieldoherty/2015/01/08/charlie-hebdo-n1940284
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2015/01/08/radical-islamic-cleric-decries-free-speech-in-column-published-at-usa-today-n1940242
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/conncarroll/2015/01/08/what-is-the-white-house-position-on-free-speech-and-terrorism-n1940245
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Related previous posts on this blog
http://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/key-previous-posts/
http://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/key-isis-hamas-benghazi-muslim-brotherhood-previous-posts/
http://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/video-watch-al-qaeda-from-yemen-murder-french-police-officer-muslim-brotherhood-founded-50-of-the-mosques-in-the-west/
http://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/video-tribute-to-charlie-hebdo-kirby-delauter-limits-of-our-bravery-10-times-western-cowards-trashed-free-speech-to-defend-islam/
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