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Tag: islamic terrorism
When Cheap Laughs Cost Too Much

When Cheap Laughs Cost Too Much

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.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. is off today.

(Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.) 

Photo: Fede Falces via Flickr

The Freedom To Provoke

The Freedom To Provoke

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.

The problem, argues former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, is that the worldwide battle with Islamic fundamentalism

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.

Hillary Clinton Visits India While Pakistan’s President Cozies Up To Iran

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in India today to discuss security issues with the massive South Asian nation that is fast becoming America’s most important strategic and economic ally. This, of course, complicates America’s relationship with Pakistan. The Pakistani military leadership there sees India as its mortal enemy, and the fallout from the killing of Osama Bin Laden on Pakistani soil has only heightened the sense that the United States would not take into account Pakistani public opinion in the fight against Islamic terrorism.

In response, Pakistan has been drifting toward China as a new ally, a policy that that has picked up pace in recent weeks after the U.S. held up nearly $1 billion in aid due to a lack of military cooperation. However, American officials have brushed it off, seeming almost happy that their problem child had found a new patron to bother. But while increasing Sino-Pakistani ties may not bother American policymakers, Pakistani President Ali Zardari’s most recent foreign policy intiative should cause more concern — he visited Tehran this past weekend for the second time in a month.