Monty Python's Michael Palin Scared to Make Fun of Islam

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Comedians in the free world will make fun of anything, right? Well, not quite. The following was originally published on Answering Muslims:

Trey Parker and Matt Stone received death threats after announcing that Muhammad would be appearing on an episode of South Park, so the network scrubbed the episode of anything remotely offensive in order to avoid becoming a target.

The writers for that week's episode of The Simpsons sympathized with Stone and Parker, acknowledging that criticizing Islam is simply too dangerous.

Likewise, Penn Jillette (of the comedy duo "Penn and Teller") said that he and Teller won't mock Islam because they "have families."

Now the great Michael Palin is admitting that he's afraid to make fun of Islam.

How long can Western civilization continue to claim, on the one hand, that Islam is no different from other religions, and, on the other hand, that Islam is clearly far more dangerous than other religions?

Daily Mail—During his Monty Python days he poked fun at everyone from the Establishment to Christianity.

But thanks to the threat of ‘heavily armed’ fanatics, Michael Palin has admitted there is one comedy taboo he is too scared to break - Islam.

The 70-year-old said religious sensitivities have increased so much since his comedy days it would now be impossible to make 1979 film Life of Brian - which satirised the life of Jesus - let alone laugh at Muslims.

He said: ‘Religion is more difficult to talk about. I don’t think we could do Life of Brian any more. A parody of Islam would be even harder.

‘We all saw what happened to Salman Rushdie and none of us want to get into all that. It’s a pity but that’s the way it is. There are people out there without a sense of humour and they’re heavily armed.’

In 1989, Mr Rushdie was forced into hiding after the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for him to be killed in revenge for his novel The Satanic Verses. (Continue Reading.)

Of course, comedians and comedy writers aren't the only ones who have admitted their fear of Islam. During a Question and Answer session, textual critic Bart Ehrman said that the reason he doesn't write about the Qur'an the way he writes about the Bible is that he values his life. Watch a short video of Bart Ehrman saying so by clicking here.

Will Muslim organizations like CAIR and ISNA condemn Palin, Ehrman, and others as "Islamophobes" and "bigots" for saying that it's too dangerous to criticize Islam? Or is the silencing of critics precisely the goal of these organizations?

For more on this topic, be sure to watch "Don't Make Fun of Muhammad."

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Profits for "the Prophet's" Followers: Where Does It Come From?

Since Muhammad, orthodox Muslims have found methods to simultaneously weaken non-Muslims while strengthening Islam. Muhammad raided the caravans of his enemies, for example, which materially supported his army while impoverishing Islam's enemies.

With the establishment of the jizya — the tax Christians and Jews must pay in Muslim countries — the power of the Muslim state increases while simultaneously weakening competing ideologies.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban are following Muhammad's example. The organizations and their operations are funded in two ways. One is by growing opium and selling it to the infidels, which of course, is a way to simultaneously strengthen their cause and weaken their enemies. The answer to this is to not buy their drugs, of course. And try to prevent it from being imported into our country. And to do whatever we can to stop funding the forces working against us.

The second way Al Qaeda and the Taliban are funded is with Saudi oil money, a source of money that also supports the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Students Association, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (the OIC, the largest voting bloc in the U.N. and the largest international organization outside the U.N.).

Saudi Arabia is the most influential member of the illegal price fixing cartel, OPEC, and Saudi Arabia insists on keeping the world price of oil high — simultaneously strengthening orthodox Islam and weakening non-Muslims globally. Iran is also an influential member of OPEC. Iranian oil money funds their nuclear program, and financially supports Hezbollah and Hamas.

In other words, OPEC keeps the world price of oil high, which simultaneously strengthens their cause and weakens their enemies. The answer to this is to not buy their oil, of course. And try to prevent it from being imported into our country. And to do whatever we can to stop funding the forces working against us.

But there's a catch. We produce oil ourselves. Many people believe the answer is to keep using oil but avoid importing any. But whether we import OPEC oil or drill it at home, the world's oil price remains the same because OPEC produces such a large percentage of the world's oil supply that they can dictate the price. And if we don't import it, other infidels will, and at OPEC's inflated price. So the third jihad retains its funding whether we abstain from importing oil or not. In fact, even if we import none of their oil, we still import their price because our own oil producers sell it to us at the world oil price, not some specially discounted price for their fellow citizens.

But if we could drill enough, couldn't we lower the world's oil price? Yes, if we could drill the equivalent of what all twelve OPEC nations produce, we might do it. But the oil produced in infidel nations is more expensive to produce, so if our domestic oil producers drilled enough oil to drop the global price, it would likely stop being profitable for most of them. Saudi Arabia has the advantage because theirs is the cheapest-to-produce oil in the world.

So they have us over a barrel. But only as long as oil retains its monopoly. As soon as the fuel market has competition, the monopoly will be broken, fuel prices will drop drastically, new businesses will boom in our country because the new competing fuels will be produced domestically, and the regimes running the OPEC nations will collapse because they won't be able to sustain their spending. Funds now promoting jihad around the world will dry up. And the economies of the free world will thrive.

This is entirely possible. And this year we could see the oil monopoly go the way of AT&T's long-distance monopoly. Two developments in the United States show a great deal of promise: The Fuel Freedom Foundation will be initiating several pilot projects in U.S. cities in 2014, and a bill has already been introduced into the U.S. Congress that would instantly create fuel competition in America. It's called the Open Fuel Standard Act and several powerful organizations have endorsed it, including ACT for America and the U.S. Energy Security Council.

The end of oil's monopoly is the most effective way to end the third jihad. Breaking oil's monopoly on transportation would simultaneously weaken the global jihad and strengthen non-Muslim nations around the world. Please throw your weight behind this movement and help your fellow non-Muslims see the wisdom and urgency in opening transportation fuel to a free market. The way to win this war is to concentrate our forces at the decisive point. Oil's monopoly is the decisive point.

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Muslims Captured and Enslaved Hundreds of Americans

The following passages are excerpted from the excellent book, The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805, by Richard Zacks:

In 1801, just after the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson, Tripoli had become the first country ever to declare war on the United States. The ruler, Yussef Karamanli, had ordered his Janissaries to chop down the flagpole at the U.S. consulate to signal his grave displeasure with the slow trickle of gifts from America. Jefferson, when he learned the news, had responded by sending a small fleet to confront Tripoli and try to overawe it into a peace treaty.

For more than two centuries, the Barbary countries of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli (now called Libya) had been harassing Christian ships, seizing cargo and capturing citizens. Algiers once boasted more than 30,000 Christian slaves, including one Miguel Cervantes, before he wrote Don Quixote. European powers in the 1500s and 1600s fought ferocious battles against Muslim pirates like Barbarosa. However, over time, a cynical system of appeasement had developed. The nations of Europe paid tribute — in money, jewels, and naval supplies — to remain at peace. England and France — in endless wars — found it cheaper to bribe the Barbary pirates than to devote a squadron to perpetually trawling the sea off Africa. At its core, expediency outweighed national honor.

When the thirteen American colonies split off from mother England, they lost British protection. The United States found itself lumped in the pile of potential Barbary victims, alongside the likes of Sardinia and Sicily. (From 1785 to 1815, more than six hundred American citizens would be captured and enslaved. This nuisance would prove to be no mere foreign trade issue but rather a near-constant hostage crisis.)

In colonial days, preacher Cotton Mather had described Barbary slaves as living for years in dug-out pits with a crosshatch of bars above... Galley slaves also lived to tell of being chained naked to an oar, forced to row ten hours at a stretch. Slaves, facing forward, pushed the forty-foot-long oars by rocking back to near horizontal, as though in a grotesque limbo contest, and then lurching with full strength, again and again. During hard chases, they were sustained by a wine-soaked rag shoved in their mouths...

Rituals varied, but in one account (of a North African slave auction) an American stated that after being purchased: "I was forced to lie down in the street and take the foot of my new master and place it upon my neck." Another described being forced to lick the dust along a thirty-foot path to the throne of the [king] of Algiers (now called Algeria).

John Foss survived captivity in Algiers, and his popular account ran in several American newspapers in the late 1790s, fleshing out the nightmare. He wrote of prisoners (Americans who had been captured on American ships and enslaved) routinely shackled with forty-pound chains, forced to perform sunrise-to-sunset labor ranging from digging out sewers to hauling enormous rocks for the harbor jetty. He matter-of-factly described the most common Barbary punishment for light infractions: bastinado of 150 strokes: "The person is laid upon his face, with his hands in irons behind him and his legs lashed together with a rope. One taskmaster holds down his head and another his legs, while two others inflict the punishment upon his breech (his buttocks) with sticks, somewhat larger than an ox goad. After he has received one half in this manner, they lash his ankles to a pole, and two Turks (Muslims) lift the pole up, and hold it in such a manner, as he brings the soles of his feet upward, and the remainder of his punishment, he receives upon the soles of his feet."

In 1803, Tripoli captured the Philadelphia. The Americans onboard the beautiful 1,200-ton American frigate were captured too, most of them enslaved.

The loss of the Philadelphia and its 307 crewmen and officers on Kaliusa Reef in Tripoli harbor marked a national disaster for the young United States. The Bashaw (king of Tripoli), a wily and worthy adversary, would set his first ransom demand for the American slaves at $1,690,000, more than the entire military budget of the United States.

Navy officers like the fierce Captain John Rodgers would beg for the chance to attack Tripoli to avenge and free his comrades; diplomats such as Tobias Lear, a Harvard graduate, yearned for the glory of negotiating their release. But the man who would one day speed their freedom more than all others was a stubby disgraced former army officer...

Here's a quote by William Eaton (the stubby former army officer): "If the Congress do not consent that the government shall send a force into the Mediterranean to check the insolence of these scoundrels and to render the United States respectable, I hope they will resolve at their next session to wrest the quiver of arrows from the left talon of the American Eagle...and substitute a fiddle bow or a cigar in lieu."

Eaton also said, "Let my fellow-citizens be persuaded that there is no borne limit to the avarice of the Barbary princes; like the insatiable grave, they can never have enough. Consign them the revenues of the United States as the price of peace, they would still tax our labors for more veritable expressions of friendship. But it is a humiliating consideration to the industrious citizen, the sweat of whose brow supports him with bread, that a tithe from his hard earnings must go to the purchase of oil of roses to perfume the pirate's beard!

"It is true that Denmark and Sweden (and even the United States, following their example) gratuitously furnish almost all their materials for ship-building and munitions of war; besides the valuable jewels and large sums of money we are continually paying into their hands for their forbearance, and for the occasional ransom of captives...Without these resources they would soon sink under their own ignorance and want of means to become mischievous. Why this humiliation? Why furnish them the means to cut our own throats?"

After the crew of the Philadelphia was enslaved, the captives were hoping the U.S. government would pay their ransom and bring them home.

Everyone knew that ransom might take months or years, but they also knew that there existed a simple way for the men to become free immediately, and that was to convert to Islam. Less than three weeks into captivity, John Wilson, a quartermaster born in Sweden, decided to "turn Turk" (convert), as did Thomas Prince, a seventeen-year-old from Rhode Island. Three more Americans would follow them.

The officials of Tripoli, who encouraged and allowed the religious conversion, took the matter seriously. Since the Koran forbids Muslims from enslaving Muslims, a conversion meant freedom from slavery. As Ray put it, "Thomas Prince was metamorphosed from a Christian to a Turk." His choice word metamorphosed was quite apt. Not only did the ritual involve words of faith and promises to perform new rituals, but also a change of clothes and that inevitable loss of foreskin. While circumcision is not mentioned in the Koran (as it is in the Old Testament, Genesis 17:11), the rite became sanctified by Muslim theologians as far back as the seventh and eighth centuries.

The main story of the book is that William Eaton and seven U.S. Marines organized and led a group of thousands of enemies of the king of Tripoli and captured the second biggest city in the country, making the king willing to negotiate a treaty and return the captured Americans. A few years later, the American navy became powerful enough to put a permanent end to the Muslim capture of American ships in the Mediterranean.

The above (except what is in italics) was excerpted from the book, The Pirate Coast, by Richard Zack. Without ever saying it explicitly, these excerpts demonstrate that aggression toward Western nations in the name of Islam is not a modern phenomenon, and is not caused by recent grievances. Modern grievances used to justify violence are pretexts, used since Mohammad's time (read more about that here). The reason Thomas Jefferson knew this is because he read the Koran.  

If you would like to share the excerpts above, we've posted these same passages on Inquiry Into Islam (to make it easier to share). Use this link: Hundreds of Americans Were Captured and Enslaved

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The Story of Mohammed

More people need to understand that the Muslims doing bad things in the name of Islam are not distorting Islamic texts, but are following them faithfully. Our fellow non-Muslims need to understand that the problem is not that some crazy people use Islamic texts to justify whatever they want to do. The problem is the ideology itself. Specifically, the problem is the Islamic texts themselves. The teachings are dangerous to non-Muslims.

One of the best ways to help people understand this is to talk about Mohammed. Since it says in the Koran 91 times that Muslims should follow Mohammed's example, understanding Mohammed is a quick and easy way to understand Islam. I'd like to introduce you to a great resource to help you help others learn about Mohammed. It's a book entitled, The Story of Mohammed by Harry Richardson. You can read the book online here for free. You can download a PDF of the book here. And you can buy the book for six dollars here so you can share it with your friends and family.

Why would a non-Muslim want to read the story of Mohammed? On Harry Richardson's blog, he gives this answer:

Mohammed’s story is the most incredible story never told. It is said that truth is stranger than fiction and honestly, NO ONE could have made this up. There are battles, murders, intrigues, rapes, assassinations, torture, intimidation, and much much more. Along the way Mohammed invented Jihad, the most effective system of conquest ever devised.

Mohammed’s life story is also the key which unlocks the complexities and confusion of the Islamic religion itself. By understanding his story we quickly gain a clear insight into Islam and the incredible importance this subject holds for our future.

This amazing book pulls no punches and brings the subject to life in a way which is both fascinating and informative. Rather than looking at Islam through a prism of Western (and by default, Christian) perspective, it examines the Islamic perspective itself.

In doing so it illuminates the contrast between Western and Islamic ethics and beliefs in plain and simple language which makes it a delight to read.

There are no apologies, no excuses and no pretending. This is not Islam as we want it to be, this is Islam as it really is.

You need to read this book now because in today’s world, this information is vital.

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