Some people unfortunately think that the best way to respond to the intolerance of Muslim fanatics is to insult all Muslims.
That’s the twisted thinking behind professional Muslim baiter Pamela Geller’s ill-advised contest in Garland, Texas. Her organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, offered a $10,000 prize to a cartoonist deemed to have drawn the best mocking picture of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad.
Most Muslims quite sensibly ignored the stunt. But when you bait enough people, somebody will rise to the provocation. Two heavily armed and armored Muslim men from Phoenix arrived to shoot up the contest, authorities say, but were blocked by the Garland police force. A traffic cop fatally shot both — and Geller succeeded in making her own organization sound no less reckless than the fanatics she baited.
Oh, sure, there are some people who buy into Geller’s insistence that she is only defending free speech. But that does not excuse her from criticism for expressing reckless speech.
As you probably know, Geller’s contest is just one of the more bizarre reactions to the murderous January assault on the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo by two French Islamic extremists who were offended by the magazine’s depiction of Muhammad.
For the record, Charlie Hebdo cartoonists Jean-Baptiste Thoret and Gerard Biard declared there was “no comparison” between the “equal-opportunity offense” in their criticism of all religions and the Islamaphobic slant of Geller’s stunt.
Yet Charlie Hebdo also has been sharply criticized by many who affirm their right to print what they print but sharply dislike some of what they’re printing.
For example, after the writers’ organization PEN announced that it was giving an award to Charlie Hebdo, six writers who had earlier agreed to be “table hosts” at the gala backed out. While deploring censorship and violence, a letter signed by dissenting PEN members said in part, “(In) an unequal society, equal-opportunity offense does not have an equal effect.”
The letter echoed a criticism of Charlie Hebdo‘s humor in a speech by “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau at journalism’s prestigious George Polk Awards: “Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny — it’s just mean.”
Trudeau probes a central question in this debate: What is satire for? It is meant to be humorous, but it isn’t always. It should aim to “punch up, not down,” as the old saying goes, but sometimes even a seemingly disempowered minority group can exercise oppressive, lethal power when it runs amok with murderous fanaticism.
With this debate bubbling through the media community, I was not surprised to hear it pop up in a question to Kevin “Kal” Kallaugher, editorial cartoonist at The Economist and the Baltimore Sun. As he accepted the 2015 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning at the Library of Congress in Washington, he was asked, “Would he enter the Texas contest?”
No, Kal said, and he would not encourage any of his fellow cartoonists to do it, either. “It seemed to me to be a bit of a stunt.” Whatever the contest was trying to prove about freedom of expression, he said, it ended up “bordering on hate speech.”
As a board member of the Herb Block Foundation, which sponsors the prize, I have been in numerous discussions like this centering on an almost mystical question: “What would Herb do?”
Block, perhaps better known by his pen name Herblock, was a four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post. Even as a student, I idolized the Chicago-born artist for his ability to reduce the powerful and pompous through the fine art of ridicule. His cartoons branded red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy with the term “McCarthyism.” He wore his place on President Richard M. Nixon’s infamous “enemies list” like a badge of honor.
Yet, as much as he championed speech and press freedoms, his work is worth our admiration because, among other distinctions, he’d rather sacrifice humor in a cartoon than paint his adversaries with too broad of a brush. Sometimes a cheap laugh isn’t worth the price.
It’s still a radical document, the U.S. Constitution, no part of it more so than the First Amendment. Almost everybody’s for freedom of speech, particularly for themselves and people who agree with them. However, the part about no establishment of religion vexes True Believers of every persuasion. How can government possibly remain neutral in matters of faith?
But what really confuses people is an episode like the recent failed terrorist attack in Garland, Texas. Does our commitment to freedom of expression require that we condemn Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, the two self-proclaimed ISIS jihadists who got themselves shot to death during an abortive attempt to massacre participants in a well-publicized contest to draw ugly cartoon caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad?
Absolutely it does. Those two murderous dimwits got exactly what they came looking for. Although nobody’s saying so, something tells me the police officer who took them down wasn’t just the average traffic cop. That fellow would have been all over TV by now. This guy has remained anonymous. Amateurs are ill advised to get into gun battles with professionals.
But are we therefore also required to admire Pamela Geller, co-founder and president of Stop Islamization of America, the organization that sponsored the cartoon contest? No, we are not. The right to free speech does not include the right not to be criticized.
I’m glad nobody shot her. However, Geller’s actions were deliberately and characteristically provocative, coarse and contemptuous of others’ beliefs; in short, the very definition of bigotry. In the final analysis, those actions are also damaging to this country’s ability to prevail in its long twilight struggle with radical Islamic terrorism.
The amazing thing is how observers find this hard to see. Writing in his Washington Post media column, the normally sensible Erik Wemple takes issue with Geller’s critics. “And who’s being treated as the public enemy on cable?” he asks incredulously. “The woman who organized a cartoon contest.”
I’m pretty sure Wemple would take a different view of a Stormfront competition to caricature the ugliest hook-nosed rabbi.
But hold that thought.
“To her enduring credit,” Wemple adds “Fox News’ Megyn Kelly has been screaming all week about the folly of the ‘too-provocative’ crowd.”
Indeed she has. Interestingly enough, the lovely Ms. Kelly’s antagonists include Fox News luminaries Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump, along with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, CNN’s Jake Tapper, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush and others Wemple characterizes as “folded into a crouch of cowardice and rationalization.”
Megyn Kelly’s thunderous rebuttal to O’Reilly was couched in melodramatic terms Geller herself would find appropriate: “You know what else the jihadis don’t like? They hate Jews. Should we get rid of all Jews? That’s the path we’re going to go down catering to the jihadis. There’s no satisfying them.”
Holy false dichotomies, Batman! So the choices are deliberately offend the religious sensibilities of millions of peaceable Muslims or get rid of Jews?
This kind of black-and-white thinking is pretty much the stock in trade of propagandists like Geller intent upon persuading Americans that not only ISIS and al Qaeda extremists but Islam itself and Arabs in particular are terrorist enemies of the United States. All Arabs, everywhere.
can’t be won without Muslim allies — loyal U.S. citizens who report suspicious activities; allies and proxies who fight against violent Islamism; hundreds of millions of people around the world who repudiate Salafism by the peacefulness and tolerance of their daily lives.
When Americans engage in high-profile, attention-seeking acts of blasphemy, they are not joining U.S. military and intelligence forces at the front line; they are complicating and undermining their work.
President Obama has said much the same thing.
Things might also be different if Pamela Geller didn’t have such an extensive track record. “On her website,” reports the Jewish Daily Forward “Geller has denounced President Obama as ‘a third worlder and a coward’ who ‘will do nothing but beat up on our friends to appease his Islamic overlords’ and as ‘a muhammadan’ who “wants jihad to win.”
The Anti-Defamation League has criticized Geller for “consistently vilifying the Islamic faith under the guise of fighting radical Islam.” The British government refused to let her enter that country in 2011. She has characterized other Jews who criticize her as worse than “21st-century kapos,” a reference to Jews who served as guards in Nazi death camps.
Astonishingly, after extreme-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik murdered 70 people at a Norwegian Labour Party summer youth camp in 2011, he credited Geller with inspiring him. She then assailed the Scandinavian left for harboring anti-Israel sentiments, posting a camp photo on her Atlas Shrugs website captioned: “Note the faces which are more Middle Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian.”
Non-Aryan Untermenschen, Hitler would have called them.
Screenshot: Pamela Geller debates Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary on Sean Hannity’s show, May 6, 2015.
Global warming is good for your lawn, Texas paranoia abounds, and we found the most adorably deranged complaint ever filed in federal court. Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing.
5. Ted Cruz
Last week I wrote about Lone Star State governor Greg Abbott summoning the Texas State Guard to monitor Operation Jade Helm 15 — essentially an act of capitulation to the delusional paranoia of certain constituents. And this week, that paranoia has spread even higher up the political food chain — from dissenters at a risible small town hearing all the way up to GOP presidential contender Sen. Ted Cruz.
Jade Helm 15, you may recall, is an eight-week training exercise conducted by four branches of the U.S. military. A vocal gaggle of unhinged Texans, goaded on by talk- radio hosts, think the exercise is the opening salvo in an attempt by the federal government to declare martial law in the Republic of Texas, seizing guns and letting ISIS soldiers roam rampant.
Part of the insanity can be attributed to a misreading of this map, which indicates that Texas was to play the role of hostile territory in the war games. This misunderstanding, compounded with a long-simmering mistrust of the federal government and a particular animus for the current administration, has blown up beyond anyone’s expectations and made Texas a national laughingstock.
Which brings us to Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz. Rather than throwing water on the flames, Cruz signaled his support for Abbott and his fellow kooky Texans, expressing his empathy with those who fear and hate the federal government — you know, the one he wants to lead.
“I understand the concern that’s been raised by a lot of citizens about Jade Helm,” Cruz said. “We have seen for six years a federal government disrespecting the liberty of the citizens and that produces fear. When you see a federal government that is attacking our free speech rights, our religious liberty rights, our Second Amendment rights, that produces distrust as to government.”
The non-news cycle has been making hay recently of Modern Family actress Sofia Vergara’s very public and very ugly spat with her ex, Onion Crunchmagnate Nick Loeb, over who has the rights to their frozen embryos. The erst-couple is bringing new meaning to the word “classy” by waging their private little war in the court of public opinion, and opening another chapter in the perennial national conversation about abortion, reproductive rights, and the sanctity of life.
Enter Outnumbered, Fox News’ daily exercise in high-class trolling in which a male guest sits in on a roundtable of four women hosts. Dr. Keith Ablow played the dutiful Y chromosome representative on the show Tuesday to discuss his views on unborn children, which dovetailed nicely with a certain streak of men’s rights activism you sometimes hear on Fox News. (Incidentally, during one of Ablow’s previous appearances on Outnumbered, he gallantly told Michelle Obama to drop a few pounds.)
“Why would a woman’s right to decide what to do with a frozen embryo trump a man’s right every time?” he asked. “If he wants to bring these embryos to term, good for him. He wants to parent. If he wants to have them adopted, good for him. You know what, it’s not a coin toss. It’s whoever wants that potential being to survive, that’s who wins.”
Not one to quit while ahead, Ablow further clarified that he believes men have the right to “veto” abortions. “I’ve been outspoken on this,” he said. “I think men should be able to veto women’s abortions if they’re willing to care for the child after it’s born.”
Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), whom you might recall disproved global warming by starting the world’s shortest snowball fight in the Capitol building, has opened his yap about climate change again — this time to tell us that even if carbon dioxide levels are rising (which they are), we should not cave in to “climate alarmists,” rather we should be grateful. See, it turns out CO2 is good for the environment.
Inhofe took to the Senate floor Wednesday to insist that “increasing observations suggest a much-reduced and practically harmless climate response to increased amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide.” In fact, he continued, “increased carbon… has led to a greening of the planet and contributed to increased agricultural productivity.” (Video, courtesy of Raw Story, is below.)
Carbon pollution, in other words, is nothing to be concerned about. We should celebrate our greenification of Gaia by rolling around in the fresh grass and congratulating ourselves for not letting the fear-mongering federal government rule our lives. Hurrah.
Now, it would be one thing if Inhofe were just another climate crank, but unfortunately for anyone who lives on this planet, he is chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and, as we’ve noted before, one of the worst climate-change deniers out there. Previously, he described global warming as the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” compared An Inconvenient Truth to Mein Kampf, and insisted that climate change is impossible because, after all, “God’s still up there,”
“CO2 is a fertilizer,” Inhofe said Wednesday. “It is something you can’t do without. No one ever talks about the benefits that people are inducing from that as a fertilizer on a daily basis.”
In one respect, the shooting in Garland, Texas targeting the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest was the best thing that could have happened to Pamela Geller, the event’s organizer. Suddenly her nasty little exercise in Muslim baiting became yet another touchstone for free expression under fire, and Geller herself got invited to broadcast her provocative brand of idiocy on several talk shows. But rather than rallying around her as a martyr for free speech, conservative hosts took Geller to task for her needlessly incendiary behavior.
On her Wednesday show, Laura Ingraham (no stranger to This Week In Crazy) opened a can of cold hard sanity on Geller, chastising her for going out of her way to mock religion, saying it has done nothing to advance the conservative cause.
Sean Hannity brought Geller on his show so she could get into a zero-sum screaming match with the extremely conservative Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary, the “radical London imam” Hannity rolls out whenever he needs a straw man. (Nobody to root for there, really.)
Bill O’Reilly asserted, “Insulting the entire Muslim world is stupid!” and even Donald Trump said the cartoons were just plain “DUMB.”
“The U.S. has enough problems without publicity seekers going out and openly mocking religion in order to provoke attacks and death,” Trump tweeted.
Geller, the president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, has stirred this particular pot before, purchasing Islamophobic ads in the NYC subway and blogging tirelessly about her crusade against the forthcoming “Islamic takeover.”
Taken to task by just about everyone from all over the political spectrum, Geller finally lost it on Martha MacCallum’s show Tuesday.
After MacCallum played a clip of Catholic League president Bill Donohue calling Geller out, she snapped: “There’s a war going on! I mean what would he have said about Rosa Parks? ‘Rosa Parks should never have gone to the front of the bus. She’s taunting people’?”
Yes, Geller, in her single-minded quest to provoke the ire of Muslims (or “savages,” as she calls them), has likened herself to civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks. Watch the video from the show below.
A humble Nebraska woman is suing every single gay person in the country, and in doing so has risen above the mire of kooks that populate the political-media landscape to assume my #1 spot this week.
Sylvia Ann Driskell, identifying herself as the ambassador for “God and His, Son, [sic] Jesus Christ,” filed a complaint in federal court on Their behalf last week, naming as defendants, simply, “Homosexuals.”
In what is unquestionably a new high for penmanship and a new low for humanity, Driskell composed her seven-page complaint of utter nonsense entirely in exquisite cursive script. In her capacity as Plaintiffs’ ambassador, she fails to cite any statutes or court decisions that would bolster Their case. However, she does invoke the books of Leviticus, Proverbs, Romans, Isaiah, Genesis, and Webster’s Dictionary, which she uses to help her define words like “sin” and “parent,” but apparently not to help her spell tricky words like “and.”
“Your Honor,” she writes, “I’ve heard the boasting of the Defendant: the Homosexuals on the world news from the Young, to the Old; to the rich an famous [sic], and to the not so rich an famous [sic].”
In the conclusion of her complaint, the 66-year-old Driskell begs the court to rule against all homosexuals, because to permit their “lewd” behavior would be to invite Plaintiffs’ wrath.
“Never before has Our Great Nation the United State [sic] of America our great State of Nebraska; [sic] been besiege [sic] by sin,” she writes. “The way to destroy any Nation, or State is to destroy its morals; Look what happen [sic] to Sodom and Gomorrah two city because of the same immoral behavior thats [sic] present in Our Nation, in Our States, and our cities; God destroy them.”
