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Tag Archives: Muhammad Cartoons

On the Twisted Need to Defend Pamela Geller

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Interview

≈ Comments Off on On the Twisted Need to Defend Pamela Geller

Tags

Charlie Hebdo, free expression, Free Speech, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Glop Podcast, Islam, John Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, Muhammad Cartoons, Pamela Geller, Podcast, Rob Long

Pamela Geller

John Podhoretz:

It’s an extraordinarily distressing phenomenon and very telling fact about Western culture now…

You know, the great battles over censorship and free expression in the course of Western history over the last three centuries have largely been about high art. The suppression of Ulysses, the suppression of Lolita. The jailing of Voltaire and Diderot. The mistreatment of Flaubert over Madame Bovary and Theodore Dreiser over Sister Carrie.

And now — a fascinating phenomenon — that it is this kind of gleefully sophomoric, you know, na-na-na stuff, that we’re now called upon to defend in the name of free expression.

But if this is where the war has been declared, we have to fight for it.

Jonah Goldberg: 

That’s why [the Hebdo massacre] was an unequivocal win for the bad guys, the whole episode. No matter how it plays out, it was a win.

Everyone’s talking about how galvanized Western Europe is, how they sold 3 million copies of the next Hebdo issue.

But there’s a reason Lenin’s philosophy was “The worse, the better.”

When you live in a moment where radicals can create a crisis mentality — and create actual crises — you force everybody to take extreme positions.

In a normal situation where Muslim terrorists weren’t murdering people, none of us would want to run the crap that Charlie Hebdo ran. But we’re left with no choice but to defend running it.

So now we all defend it and we all run to the ramparts, and I’m 100% on that side. But in a healthier society, we wouldn’t even have to do this because it is offensive.

But the problem is you simply cannot be held hostage by people who murder people over this kind of thing.

__________

Podhoretz and Goldberg, talking in the 37th episode of their excellent and embarrassingly named podcast with Rob Long, GLop.

Though I don’t find myself aligning ideologically with them all that often, I’m a listener and fan of G’, Lo’, and P’ — they’re up to date, super well read, awash in cross-cultural references, and, probably more importantly, really funny.

For barely related riffs from both speakers, pick up Podhoretz’s short book on the Hillary Clinton presidential run Can She Be Stopped? or Jonah’s The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.

Keep on:

  • Douglas Murray: Should we call terrorists ‘Islamic’?
  • Neil Gaiman: Why even defend free speech today?
  • When Imams speak English

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The Cartoons the Media Will Show Us

16 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Asghar Bukhari, Blasphemy, Charlie Hebdo, Douglas Murray, Hate Speech, interview, Islam, Islamism, Muhammad, Muhammad Cartoons, Private Eye, Terrorism

Douglas Murray - Private Eye

“This is about freedom of speech.

What is going on at the moment, worldwide and particularly in Europe, is an attempt to shut down any and all criticism of Islam — one religion alone.

I’ll hold up for a moment — don’t worry it’s not a cartoon of Muhammad, you don’t have to get scared.

This is the Christmas edition of Private Eye. An image which, on the front cover, lampoons — quite amusing, not very — the Virgin Mary and Jesus and has various jokes about where the frankincense should have been bought from and so on.

That’s perfectly commonplace. But you know what: if anyone had gone into Private Eye’s offices yesterday and massacred the staff because of it in the name of Christianity or Jesus, I think that not only would all the papers today have been a lot more robust, they would have shown — at the very least, shown — this image to give us a sense of what the person who did the killing was so irate about.

The fact is that there is something going on, which we have to identify. It is an attempt, in our society, to make Islam and in particular the founder of Islam immune from any criticism.

It cannot be allowed to continue.”

__________

Douglas Murray, debating Asghar Bukhari on Britain’s Sky News last week.

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Terrorism Works

14 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, BBC, Charlie Hebdo, Douglas Murray, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Islam, Islamism, Jyllandsposten, Maajid Nawaz, Muhammad, Muhammad Cartoons, terror, Terrorism

150114_EM_CharlieHebdoEbay

Interviewer: In a sense the terrorists are winning, aren’t they? They’ve cowed the Western media into not reprinting the cartoons.

Douglas Murray: Not only are they winning, they’ve won. They’ve won. Terrorism works — that’s the brutal fact of it.

And a lot of people will take lessons from that today.

You know, after the 2005 Jyllandsposten cartoon, by the conservative paper in Denmark, the only paper in Europe, really, that was still willing to draw pictures of Muhammad in the same way they’re willing to draw pictures of every other religious, political — you name it — figure, was Charlie Hebdo.

So Charlie Hebdo stood alone. Charlie Hebdo was attacked.

That’s why I’ve suggested that there’s really only two options that the press can choose from here.

The first is that we all agree that we live under an element of Islamic blasphemy law. I think that would be highly regrettable. I don’t think that is what our society should live under. I think we should do everything possible to avoid it.

But if we are going to avoid it, I think that it’s going to have to be done unanimously. All of the newspapers, all of the magazines — the BBC, Sky, Channel 4 — should unanimously publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons at a particular hour, because as Ayaan Hirsi Ali said after the Danish cartoons row, we have to spread the risk around.

It cannot be that a single cartoonist is holding the line for all freedom of speech. Or that a single, small satirical magazine is doing it.

It has to be everybody.

__________

Douglas Murray, the clearest voice on the issue of Islamism in Europe, speaking during a BBC discussion with Maajid Nawaz.

  • I wrote an open letter to Brandeis University defending Ayaan Hirsi Ali
  • Douglas Murray gives one of my favorite speeches: If we don’t stand for Western values, who will?

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