[ Bosch Fawstin (second from left), the cartoonist who won the Muhammad
Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland, Texas this week, is presented with
his prize by (from left to right) Robert Spencer, Geert Wilders and
Pamela Geller. (Image source: Atlas Shrugs blog) ]
by Douglas Murray
- It is most important to keep
on challenging these would-be censors, so that people with Kalashnikov
rifles do not make our customs and laws.
- One of the false presumptions of our time is that people on the
political left are motivated by good intentions even when they do bad
things, while people on the political right are motivated by bad
intentions even when they do good things.
- When people prefer to focus on the motives of the victims rather
than on the motives of the attackers, they will ignore the single most
important matter: that an art exhibition, or free speech, has been
targeted.
- It does not matter if you are right-wing or left-wing, or
American, Danish, Dutch, Belgian or French. These particularities may
matter greatly and be endlessly interesting to people in the countries
in question. But they matter not a jot to ISIS or their
fellow-travellers. What these people are trying to do is to enforce
Islamic blasphemy laws across the entire world. That is all that
matters.
ISIS appears to have inspired its first terrorist attack in the United States: in Garland, Texas.
This item may have slipped the attention of many people because as is
so often the case today, much of the reporting and commentary has got
caught up on other, supplementary issues.
The supplementary issues are first, that the attack targeted a
competition set up to show images of what people thought Muhammad may
have looked like. Then, there is the identity of the people who
organized the exhibition and spoke at it.
Before coming to this, let us just return to that main issue. Since
January, the idea that ISIS-like groups can inspire people to carry out
murderous attacks in Paris and Copenhagen has come to be accepted. But
that this can happen in Texas, of all places, could yet have an even
worse "chilling effect" on free speech than the attacks in Paris and
Copenhagen. No European country has the constitutional commitment to
free speech of the United States. And Texas is not stuck in the moral
relativism and fearful multiculturalism of most European countries.
There will be a feeling, post-Garland, that if ISIS can strike in
Texas, it can strike anyplace. The entire developed world is therefore a
potential site for an attack from ISIS. Although no one will put his
hands up and surrender, neither will anyone be likely to draw attention
to himself by saying or doing anything that might displease such
homicidal censors.
The presence of strong security forces clearly helps to prevent
attacks, but it is worth remembering that ISIS will use the opportunity
of such "failed" attacks to come up with other ways of operating, which
they will judge more likely to succeed.
What is most striking, however, is how silent many of the usual defenders of free speech have been.
Undoubtedly this is partly to do with the idea, becoming ingrained,
that if you draw Mohammed or publish such images, you have, in some way,
got it coming to you. This is an appalling pass to have come to, but it
is in just such way that censorship and self-censorship are allowed to
embed themselves.
Very few people say that they will not draw a historical figure
because they are scared. But attack by attack, the feeling is growing
among the majority of the media and others who have declined to publish
such images, that they have failed. So to hide that shame, they tell
themselves there is something provocative and even irresponsible in
challenging people who would challenge the freedom speech.
One might still get the support of those who cherish free speech if
one were accidentally to publish a cartoon of Mohammed, but not if you
did so deliberately, and in full knowledge of the consequences. But of
course, it is precisely after facing the consequences of challenging
these would-be censors that it is most important to keep on challenging
them, so that people with Kalashnikov rifles do not make our customs and
laws.
As people come up with ever more elaborate ways to justify what they
probably know in their hearts to be contemptible, it becomes harder and
harder for them to change course.
Then there is the other only-occasionally-spoken-about supplementary
issue, which may well be at the root of the difference between the
assaults in Europe and the response to the attempted Texas assault. The
January massacre at the satirical French magazine
Charlie Hebdo
undoubtedly woke up a portion of the general public in the West because
the victims were cartoonists and editors at a "left-wing" magazine. That
is,
Charlie Hebdo stood for a type of robust secular,
anti-establishment type of French politics, which a portion of the left
worldwide could recognize as its own.
This stands in contrast to the comparative lack of solidarity after threats to the Danish newspaper,
Jyllands-Posten, in the wake of the 2005 Mohammed cartoons affair. To varying degrees,
Jyllands-Posten
was described as a "conservative" paper. In this context, unsure
whether "conservative" meant anything from "establishment" all the way
to "racist," there was often suspected to be some dark, ulterior motive
for publishing cartoons of the founder of Islam.
There is, however, no escaping such smears. Plenty of people proved
willing, in the wake of the Paris attack, to smear the murdered
cartoonists of
Charlie Hebdo as far-right-wing or racist.
The organizers at the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI),
Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, are not left-wing journalists but
conservative activists; and because the Dutch politician Geert Wilders
spoke at the opening of the exhibition, that added a layer of complexity
for people who like labeling actions with political valences, rather
than just seeing actions as apart from them. It seems clear, however,
from the pattern of condemnations on one side and silence on the other,
that a cartoonist may be worthy of defense if he is associated with a
left-wing organization, but not if he is associated with a right-wing
one.
Of course, this idea goes to one of the false presumptions of our
time: that people on the political left are motivated by good
intentions even when they do bad things, while people on the political
right are motivated by bad intentions even when they do good things. So a
cartoon promoted by
Charlie Hebdo may be thought to be
provocative in a constructive way, whereas one promoted by AFDI can only
be thought if as being provocative in an unconstructive way. Whether
people are willing to admit it or not, this is one of the main problems
that underlies the reaction to the Texas attack.
Such a distinction is, needless to say, a colossal mistake. When
people prefer to focus on the motives of the victims rather than on the
motives of the attackers, they will ignore the single most important
matter: that an art exhibition, or free speech, has been targeted. The
rest is narcissism and slow-learning.
It does not matter if you are right wing or left wing. It does not
matter if you are American, Danish, Dutch, Belgian or French, or whether
you are from Texas or Copenhagen. These particularities may matter
greatly and be endlessly interesting to people in the countries in
question. But they matter not a jot to ISIS or their fellow-travellers.
What these people are trying to do is to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws
across the entire world.
That is all that matters. If we forget this or lose sight of it, not only will we lose free speech, we will lose, period.
Shoebat.com,
yesterday, found it easy to recognize from the lingo “bro” and the
Arabic written in English “Amirul Mu’minin” which meant “Prince of the
Faithful” which can only be interpreted as the current Caliph Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi of ISIS.
This would mean, as we reported, that the two are lone wolves and are
homegrown American Muslim terrorists, who gave allegiance to ISIS.
Hassan is wanted by the FBI and is on an FBI photo list alongside other Somali terrorists, as we can see from this snapshot:
Last year, Shoebat.com reported of how an ISIS propaganda trading group posted these disturbing words on Twitter:
