Tuesday, April 28, 2015

'Toonist Gary Trudeau Is a Huge Dhimmi

Or, to put it another way--as Robert Spencer does--it's Doonesbury for Sharia:
Speaking at the George Polk journalism awards on April 9 as he received a lifetime achievement award, Trudeau charged that the cartoonists had “wandered into the realm of hate speech.” He called for self-censorship in the face of violent intimidation, saying that “free speech … becomes its own kind of fanaticism.” 
Trudeau’s words, understandably, incited controversy, and so on Meet the Press last week he attempted to clarify his earlier remarks and dispel the impression that he was blaming the victims for the massacre. However, he only ended up digging the hole deeper and affirming his submission to violent intimidation and implicit acceptance of Sharia blasphemy laws. 
In an interview with a fawning and obsequious Chuck Todd, Trudeau assured the world that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were “not at all to blame,” but then immediately relapsed into blaming them for their own murders, saying: “I didn’t agree with the decisions they made that brought a world of pain to France.” 
Yet it was the jihad mass murderers, not Charlie Hebdo, that brought a world of pain to France. If they had not been willing to commit mass murder in the service of Sharia blasphemy laws, France would not have experienced any pain at all. On Meet the Press, Trudeau was saying that the proper response to a thug who threatens to kill you unless you shut up was to submit and obey. That would in effect install a thugocracy, allowing those who will kill the most people the most ruthlessly the right to rule.
And, as we know, the fact that jihadis want to kill us has a lot to do with Trudeau's desire to placate them, a tactic he would never employ with, say, Christians:
If I believe something is sacred and holy, does that oblige you also to respect it? Trudeau would apparently say yes. I doubt, however, that he would say the same thing when it came to Piss Christ or the dung-encrusted painting of the Virgin Mary that was exhibited in New York a few years ago. But Christians won’t kill him for offending them.
Exactly. And that, my friends, is why there's a Tony award-winning musical called The Book of Mormon and there will never be one called The Book of Koran.

Update: Further to my statement above, Sam Harris, who has been accused of "Islamophobia" because he, like Robert Spencer, has dared to point out some problematic aspects of the faith, wrote this in June of last year:
Let’s take a trip to the real world. Consider: Anyone who wants to draw a cartoon, write a novel, or stage a Broadway play that denigrates Mormonism is free to do it. In the United States, this freedom is ostensibly guaranteed by the First Amendment—but that is not, in fact, what guarantees it. The freedom to poke fun at Mormonism is guaranteed by the fact that Mormons do not dispatch assassins to silence their critics or summon murderous hordes in response to satire. As I have pointed out before, when The Book of Mormon became the most celebrated musical of the year, the LDS Church protested by placing ads for the faith in Playbill. A wasted effort, perhaps: but this was a genuinely charming sign of good humor, given the alternatives. What are the alternatives? Can any reader of this e page imagine the staging of a similar play about Islam in the United States, or anywhere else? No you cannot—unless you also imagine the creators of this play being hunted for the rest of their lives by religious maniacs. Yes, there are crazy people in every faith—and I often hear from them. But what is true of Mormonism is true of every other faith, with a single exception.  At this moment in history, there is only one religion that systematically stifles free expression with credible threats of violence. The truth is, we have already lost our First Amendment rights with respect to Islam—and because they brand any observation of this fact a symptom of Islamophobia, Muslim apologists like [Glenn]Greenwald are largely to blame.
I think it's fair to blame the likes of Gary Trudeau--as well as dhimmified PEN members Ondaatje, Prose, Carey et al--too.

Update: I'd like to include someone else on the "blame" list:
Some, like the historian Karen Armstrong, preferred to excuse anti-Semitic extremism as an expected reaction to disagreeable Israeli policies.
You mean to say, Ms. A., that without those "disagreeable" policies, the extremism would come to an end? You'll forgive me if I find that rather hard to believe, given that, for these Muslims, Israel's most disagreeable policy of all is its insistence on existence.

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