‘Humbug’ wrote an e-mail to Samizdata regarding the Free Expression versus Islamic intolerance issue that takes a more introspective view
I do not know why I am wasting my time waiting for Hollywood or anyone in the music industry to come out and stand up for free speech. Here we have a global conflict that will forever impact our future and these ‘sophisticated elites’ are hiding behind the gates in their upscale neighborhoods. The ‘shocking’ photo of the dull Kanye West or the equally ‘provocative’ photo of Madonna as The Madonna are simply boring.
Of course neither of them would ever dare pose as Mohammed or appear wearing a burqa. Heck no, that would not be the run of the mill, piss off the parents material, that might actually get them a fatwa.
Eminem, likewise would never dare insult the ‘one who must not be seen’. No, he will stick with making fun of groups where the penalty is merely a slap on the wrist, like homosexuals and women. Michael Moore we can all forget about it, just as we can forget about the Dixie Chicks. The problem here is that standing up for free speech in this case, does not involve Bush bashing and it actually takes courage to fight this battle. With icons like these, who needs an invading army?
But then, I am just repeating what many have already said.
Update: however Lil’ Kim shows the correct way to wear a burqa
Canada’s Western Standard magazine has shown some stones and published the cartoons. Watch for Canadian flags and embassies to join the inferno.
Your link wasn’t working when I clicked it – but three cheers for Western Standard!
Given the depths of dhimmitude in Peter MacKay’s pronouncements on the cartoons coupled with the arrest of the heckler at the protest in Montreal over the weekend, it will be ironic in the extreme if Canada gets added to the muslim world’s persona non grata list.
Not that I’m saying it wouldn’t happen…
Good on The Western Standard. Not part of the eastern liberal establishment (dedicated to dhimmitude and bringing down the West, I see).
Re the burqa, I have said before, if the entertainment industry and the fashion industry had the guts, they could disable the burqa in around six months.
As in, Madonna could perform wearing one of her normal sleazy outfits, but with a burqa. We could have photos of pole dancers wearing burqas. We could have chadors on the catwalk, except tighter than normal and with slits up to the hipbone. Transparent chadors. Burqas with huge fake eyelashes and sequined lips. And … well, you get the idea. Trash the burqa and make it sexy/sleazy, whatever. But take ownership of it and wreck it for the Islamics.
This would work. Once you’d Westernised it and sleazed it up, it would lose its value to them. Their women may have to start wearing normal clothes, just to dissociate themselves from it. Of course, there would be riots from the adherents of the religion of peace, but there are riots anyway. May as well give them something to riot about – and have a bit of a giggle at the same time.
Ezra Levant, who is the publisher of the Western Standard, has this column in the Calgary Sun today justifying his decision to publish the cartoons.
It’s way cool – give it a read.
Thanks again to Jaeger! I didn’t know the Western Standard had published the cartoons till I read your comment.
Maybe, just maybe…the “entertainment industry” types you mention don’t stand up for free speech in the face of islam because there is no money in it?
Bush bashing has a huge demographic.
Market at work?
I don’t really know, but if I had to guess I’d say there’s tons of money in in making fun of Islam – if you count red state viewers. Plus – wasn’t it a Hollywood man who said that there’s no such thing as bad publicity? There’s probably something to what you say, sure – but I think the better explanation is the one in the original post: Hollywood types like to style themselves as cutting edge and radical, but most lack the guts to really challenge anyone. Ergo – they pick easy targets.
Joshua, thank you. Ezra Levant is another brave man, and my hat is off to him and my heart’s with him. Like those two fine demonstrators in the middle of the Paris demonstration.
I find the “entertainment indusrtry” liberal mafia’s Bushwhacking sickening. It’s almost as though it’s compulsory to be “liberal”.
I don’t like Bush either but it isn’t “of course, I’m anti-Bush…”
I do like Guest Writer’s comparison of Madonna et al’s behaviour to teenage rebellion. I so much preferred Madonna when she was a “material girl”. That had integrity.
Don’t even get me started on Live8…
The fear among the media types, not to mention the political and commercial panderers, is almost palpable.
They are used to being “heroic” in relatively free societies which rarely do more than huff and puff when they come out with something egregiously offensive.
That’s when you get that petulant assertion that criticizing whatever the nonsense du jour is constitutes censorship and promotes a chilling effect on every heroic artist everywhere.
For decades, we have been hearing the justification that art is supposed to be provocative, that the media are supposed to challenge our assumptions and force us to confront our failings and contradictions.
Every pissant little tousled haired non-entity who could con some avant garde type into pronouncing their latest piece of drivel a “challenge to the status quo” or claim that it “held a mirror up to the hypocrisy of commercial society” prayed that some reverend or local politician would start fulminating about the nastiness and insulting nature of some meaningless pile of crap so they could become the latest thing and get their fifteen minutes.
Now, of course, when faced with real violence and real censorship, sensitivity is suddenly required so as not to unduly antagonize and offend the Islamic world.
All of this is utterly predictable for anyone who has been following the development of multi-cultural victimology.
For the bewildered taxpayers who tried to understand why “artistic integriy” required that everything they believed in, revered, and felt deeply about was grist for the mill of any grubby mediocrity who claimed an artistic vision required that a crucifix be immersed in urine or the mother of Jesus be framed in dung, or that their most fundamental beliefs should be mocked by any editorialist, cartoonist, or oh-so-sophisticated pundit who deigned to point out their stupidity, bias, and hypocrisy, this sudden revelation that all that driving artistic and editorial compulsion was, in fact, the cowardice of a schoolyard bully who only trips the skinny kid with glasses, never the center on the football team, has opened a lot of eyes.
I realize that while we’re in the middle of all the tumult, it’s hard to see any silver lining. But a lot of veils have fallen, a lot of mealy mouthed BS had been exposed for just that, and nothing more.
From my vantage point, that is a very good thing indeed.
veryretired – Bravissimo!
Yes, why exactly are you wasting your time waiting for someone in Hollywood or the music industry to make a statement in the wake of “InToonFada”? The artists mentioned may have appealed to freedom of speech to defend their own personal statements or work, but I do not recall any of them ever going on a crusade for free speech outside of this context. So, why would you now expect for them to do so in this situation? The appropriate target of your disgust is, of course, the media outlets that have published controversial speech by these artists in the past and refuse to carry comparably controversial speech in the current cartoon controversy.
Veryretired – you are my fucking hero. I’ll follow you to Thermopylae, Tours or to the gates of Perdition!! Well said!
Ty for all the overly generous praise, but I spent a long weekend in Perdition and the hotel was lousy.
It is very rare now to see any major Hollywood film-maker or actor come out for free speech in a totally principled way. Rowan Atkinson, the British comic actor, has been excellent over the UK govt’s attempt to ban criticism of religion, and a few others, but that’s it. Spielberg? Nope. Harvey Weinstein? Nada. Disney? No. None of the big guns have said anything.
Don’t expect that fat lump of malevolence, M. Moore, to take such a stand. He likened the Baathist dead-enders and head-hackers in Iraq to the Minutemen of the U.S. Revolution. Objectively, Moore is a defender of islamofascism, pure and simple.
Verity – your approach to the burqa is a sound one, and it would be very interesting to see the ‘outrage’ and in this case there is no excuse of religious outrage!
The coverings are cultural and a distortion, for the hijab is a wimple by any other name IMHO. It was suggested in teachings, IIRC, for ‘pious women’ to wear such. Now, slap me with a lettuce, but my guess is ‘pious woman’ = ‘nun’.
All women should be nuns in the world of Islam…
veryretired – what a really interesting and well written post. thankyou.
I agree entirely with what you write but i am not surprised. The entertainment industry (whether MTV or Hollywood) is all about keeping up appearances. Every word uttered, every friendship taken, every party attended and every dress worn is a statement – a pre-planned statement to craft a saleable image.
Political views are just another small part of that image. Hollywood actors would no sooner be seen supporting Bush than they would serve Blue Nun wine at a dinner party. This is because being anti-Bush is cool; being seen to care about ‘the environment’ is cool; being anti-war is cool; mocking Christianity is cool; mocking Islam isn’t.
I don’t blame the actors and musicians themselves. They are doing what all good capitalists aspire to – they are building a brand.
It is those who listen to them that deserve our contempt.
For this reason alone, Van Gogh truly deserves our respect for being one of the few artists who stood up for what he professed to believe in… and paid the price.
Basically because entertainment types are cowards and spend most of their time trying to cover their careers.
I think some people on this site are forgetting what Capitalism is really all about. We love Capitalism because it leaves individuals free to make the decisions that are important to them for themselves. Profits legitimately earned (which includes Hollywood superstars like Michael Moore, much as I hate to admit it) should be retained by those who earned them, of course. But let’s please not take the attitude that “he’s just earning a profit” is an excuse for anything a person wants to do. Michael Moore is a bully and a fraud. He’s a rich buly and fraud to be sure (and I envy him that, I won’t lie) – but a bully and a fraud nonetheless. Just because he is “building a brand” doesn’t excuse him from this charge.
That said, I agree that hardworking people should have more in them than to cough up $9 (more than some of them make in an hour) to go watch his trash in theaters. Especially since he is their sworn enemy…
This is being looked at from the wrong perspective,this is the opportunity to shut the the liberal left up,all that is needed is to point out the various insults to Islam,Christ was a Prophet,the Piss Christ is an insult,”Munich” depicts Muslims being hunted down and killed,Tracy Emin is ugly,and should be forced to wear a burqa.
At last we have the internal contradiction which will cut the feet from under the liberal left,after all it is Western Liberalism which militant Islam hated the most.
Point of information? At least one celeb (sort of) has donned a burqa with, er, less than religious intent – if the link doesn’t work, thats Lil Kim behind that mask.
Joshua
I think you are seeing capitalism through very rose tinted spectacles. There is very little that is pretty about capitalism. It just happens to be the most effective economic system that anyone has yet come up with.
Nick – thanks. I’d like to see this up on billboards. I feel strongly that we need to trash the burqa and make it a symbol of everything they hate (which is just about everything, admittedly). If we sleazed it up enough, they wouldn’t want their women going out in it. Wreck it for them. It has no place on the streets of civilised countries anyway. It’s a step back into the Dark Ages.
Nope, I looked and looked and looked at that picture of Lil Kim and didn’t see a burka anywhere.
I’ll just slip this news in here as it’s appropriate for several of the threads running at the moment. Yesterday, as I wrote, Ireland’s Dhimmi-in-Chief, the president Mary McAleese, let the side down in Jeddah saying how absolutely shocked and appalled she was by the cartoons. This was at something called the Jeddah Economic Forum. Now it’s the turn of election loser Gerhardt Schroeder at the same forum. His exact dhimmi words: “I share with Muslims around the world the anger over the offensive cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, and we should turn to tolerance and respect of cultures and religions.”
Yeah, Gerhardt. That’s the spirit. We’re sure you were just boiling over with anger when you saw the cartoons.
Looks like the Arabs invited all the biggies to their “forum”.
Oh, but courtesy of Dhimmiwatch.org, here’s some very nice non-dhimmitude from Canada of all places:
The publisher of the Western Standard, Ezra Levant, ran the cartoons. And the Canadian Islam Congress is to bring “hate speech” charges against him. God, they’re vicious, sly little slimeballs, aren’t they?
Anyway, here’s what Mr Levant said: Although aware that Islam forbids depictions of Mohammad, “I don’t follow Muslim law. I follow Queen Elizabeth’s law.
“I don’t follow the Koran. I follow the Canadian Constitution.”
A Muslim moron (forgive the tautology) from their Islamic Congress dealie foamed that for anyone who wanted to see them, the cartoons were on the net, “so the intention was not to inform the readers but it is primarily to incite and add fuel to the fire.” He added, “Have they not seen the turmoil caused by the repeated publication of these cartoons?”
So, shut down freedom of expression because it only causes seething. The West made a huge mistake by letting them in. They are substandard.
More from Ezra Levant from a TV interview: “”The cartoons are not the problem; cartoons do not fly off the page and torch embassies — the reaction of Muslims is the problem.” Yo!
I just wanna say two things: (1) that burqa shot of Lil’ Kim looks doctored, and (2) it’s about the hottest freakin’ thing I’ve seen in a long time.
More women in sluttly burqas!
It is very rare now to see any major Hollywood film-maker or actor come out for free speech in a totally principled way. Rowan Atkinson, the British comic actor, has been excellent over the UK govt’s attempt to ban criticism of religion, and a few others, but that’s it. Spielberg? Nope. Harvey Weinstein? Nada. Disney? No. None of the big guns have said anything.
Could it be they just don’t know much about it, and don’t see Denmark as very different from Beirut anyway. My own modest dealings with Hollywood studios and other big US corporations lead me to believe that the rest of the world is very much one someplace else to many of them, a fragmented market that demands ‘localisation’ of product for a variety of bizarre reasons that are unfortunate facts of life, not matters of moral concern.
Thanks for that, Verity. I’m liking this guy Levant better and better all the time.
Don’t expect the anti-dhimmitude from Canada to continue, however. Peter MacKay – the brand new government’s minister of something hopefully unimportant (Foreign Affairs, actually – sort of depends on where you see Canada in the world as to how big a job that is…) – took dhimmitude to a new level about a week ago when he said the cartoon controversy “highlights the need for a better understanding of Islam and of Muslim communities.” That Peter MacKay is a chump should come as no surprise to anyone after the Belinda Stronach affair, I suppose, but the otherwise supercool new PM has yet to publicly correct him. Also important to keep in mind is that Canada came very close last year to allowing sharia law into its courts for muslim family affairs. They still get the lowest score in the Anglosphere for “backbone in the face of islam” in my book.
However – it’s only fair to add that the new government may well go some distance to fixing this. I would guess that most of the dhimmis in Canada live in and around Toronto or in the old PC strongholds in the east. The new government has a lot of western representation – so attitudes may change.
I had read about Atkinson speaking out and I was very proud of him. The kids and I love his stuff, although they don’t get a lot of the jokes in Black Adder.
Sometimes, although no one plans it, disparate elements come together to put an important issue in stark relief. I think this cartoon business is a situation like that.
The Islamists have exposed their irrationality by turning something annoying into the basis for homicidal rage. The multi-cultural set in politics and the media have exposed the cowardice and contradictions at the very heart of that nonsensical lunacy.
It is clear, now, even to those who don’t pay much attention to all this foolishness, that proclaiming the primacy of “injured feelings” over all other values is a disastrous error. It leads to paralysis and repression, as every group rushes to the microphone to loudly proclaim how wounded they are if someone says or publishes this picture or that opinion.
VDH has an essay I read today in which he says that the choice for Europe is whether to act as Chamberlain or Churchill in the face of Islam’s threats.
Indeed, it is a choice that faces all of us. I pick the guy with the cigar.
This is disgraceful It should be banned.
Cindy> I am surprised nobody did “Curb Your Intollerance”…
veryretired: Ever since “man of” Straw stood up the other week, I considered that his “Chamberlain moment”.
No independent confirmation that this is true (unknown source), but a muslim cultural center in Germany has invited the President of Iran to come to Auschwitz and deny the Holocaust there. From the group:
Apparently their beef is that Arabs were also killed in camps along with gypsies.
I guess these would be an example of the ever-ellusive “moderate muslim?”
Cindy, STFU.
Earlier I wrote this:
I take it back. Stephen Harper just dropped the ball.
I think the poster I liked best was “3 Men and a baby prophet”, although the “Friends” poster was pretty good.
Joshua – I went to your link. How bloody depressing.
Verity-
If you feel like drinking yourself to sleep tonight – click on the link to CBC’s “justification” for its decision not to run the cartoons. I don’t think I’ve ever heard so much oily, snivelling doubletalk crammed into one essay.
I’m really disappointed, actually. I followed the Canadian election closely because I really liked Harper. I even spent a good bit of time defending his decision to include Emerson and Fortier in the cabinet on Canadian in the comments section on Conservative blogs last week.
What a letdown this is.
Joshua – Well, I’ve already got a glass of white wine of unknown Mexican provenance to hand, although I would have anyway. But I’m very disappointed. I wonder what Mark Steyn will have to say about this. The only brave politicians in the advanced West are the brave Anders Rasmussen, and maybe George Bush. How depressing! Don’t they know where their “sensitivity” to Islamofascism is taking them?
Apparently their beef is that Arabs were also killed in camps along with gypsies.
It seems like a fair beef. That the Nazis were willing to kill anyone is, in our age of tribal particularism, a useful lesson in equal opportunities. They are not denying the murder of the Jews. The link (at least in context) isn’t depressing.
And the Islam-Archiv-Deutschland is providing a valuable service in pointing up a feature of the mental architecture of Holocaust-deniers, western and eastern.
The first psychological step is a hidden dehumanising assumption that it doesn’t really matter how many Jews were killed, because they were only Jews. From there it is easy to set aside, or misrepresent evidence and play games with numbers, because it is only a numbers game. Mass murder becomes by stages not a big deal, then negligible.
You can see precisely the same mechanism at work in the rather less developed tradition of Palestine-denial. See, for example, Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial, whose is that there were very few people in Ottoman or British Palestine, or at least very few that mattered, and the rest were recent immigrants, so expropriating and subjugating their successors isn’t really a big deal.
That isn’t an argument that ought to appeal to defenders of Israel (as opposed, say, to a promotion of Israel’s actual, present merits), but unfortunately it does. Read the rapturous reviews of Peters and compare them to the rapturous reviews of David Irving by their respective admirers, both sets congratulating them for overturning respectively Arab and Jewish propaganda.
Islam-Archiv-Deutschland is not in the business of Holocaust denial or minimisation. As a German public body, that would be constitutionally difficult for them. If you read their release and assume, just because they are Muslims, that it says the opposite of what it actually does, then you are certainly closer to the habit of mind of the Holocaust denier than they are.
Me, I’m going to value or deprecate people as individuals and on the basis of their conduct, not their bearing the label of a collective.
No one was suggesting they were, nor was the quote from them I posted meant to be taken at anything other than face value. I think there idea gets right to the point. It’s easy for clerics in Iran to deny the Holocaust where there are no relics of it and no people aroung with living memories of that period to call them out. This is an elaborate way of calling the president a coward – which is certainly true, at least in this instance.
We need to hear more from muslims like these.
If there was a tinge of sarcasm in my comment it was because I don’t think it should take “victims like me” to make anyone aware of the Holocaust. Inviting Iran to give up Holocaust denial just because there were some muslims mixed in with the jews rather exposes what’s really behind Iran’s Holocaust denial. Given that Iran’s Holocaust denial is disingenuous to begin with, it’s doubtful that getting them to change their position on it would alter their opinion of the jews or the righteousness of killing jews en masse in the slightest. It would likely only provide them with another anti-western propaganda tool – to the tune of saying that mass murder is an inherent part of western culture or some such.
“There were muslims in the mix” is NOT a good basis for Iran to change its position on the Holocaust. Any future change of tune on Iran’s part that isn’t based on a broad concern for human rights and historical accuracy isn’t worth a damn.
It’s too bad that there were some Muslims mixed in, but no one was trying to “exterminate” the Muslims. It was the Jews that Hitler was determined to wipe off the face of the earth. That some other people got mixed in along the way is irrelevant (not for them, of course, but from a historical standpoint).
The Islamofascists are vicious, vicious people.
More dhimmitude from Canadian business. From Dhimmiwatch.org
The Western Standard with Ezra Levan’t’s reprint of the cartoons won’t be in McNally Robinson Booksellers stores in Saskatoon said dhimmi-owner Paul McNally.
“We obviously are fervently in favour of freedom of expression” [oh, of course you are! Not just in favour of freedom of expression, but fervently so!] “but” [ah, the famous Islamic ‘but’!] looking at this one, we don’t see anything as being expressed except a kind of hurtfulness toward Muslims,” he said in an interview from Winnipeg.”I don’t know if there is anything to be learned or communicated by publishing the cartoons.”
The cartoons are offensive to many individuals, he added. “We feel there is nothing to gain on the side of freedom of expression and much to lose on the side of hurting feelings,” he said.
Cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck – clurckkkkkk!
“We are fervently in favour of free speech as long as no one’s feelings get hurt.”
Nice. Clearly that’s why free speech needs Charter protection. You know, because of all those people out there who are opposed to non-offensive speech.
As a serious question – are there enough muslims in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan SSR to make this commercially worthwhile? Or is he counting on kickbacks from the “I don’t do Starbucks, man” crowd?
Bringing Ahmedinijad or whatever his name is to Auschwitz would have no effect on him. He would just say the whole thing was staged. But I admire any Muslim who stands up to Holocaust deniers.
Indeed. Though admittedly it is a bit easier if you live in Germany than in the Middle East. Groupthink is appallingly infectious.