To Burn or Not to Burn the Koran?

What should be done about the Koran burning and the violence it sparks? If we prohibit Koran burning, we are essentially establishing Sharia law in our free countries, and allowing them to override our previously established rights to free speech and free expression. If we ignore it, nothing will change. What should be done? I thought this video had a sensible, reasonable, and effective solution: Respond with dramatically MORE Koran burning. Watch the nine minute video and see if you can find a flaw in his logic:

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The Psychopath’s Argument: Free Speech Kills People

IN A RECENT article at The Gates of Vienna, Dr. Nicolai Sennels, a psychologist and the author of "Among Criminal Muslims: A Psychologist’s experiences with the Copenhagen Municipality," wrote about the latest craziness from orthodox Muslim violence around the world in response to the recent burning of a Koran. Here's Sennels' article:

“But she’s asking for it! She knows I’ll beat her if she says things like that. And still she says it — it’s like she’s begging me to hit her!”

This is the typical psychopathic husband’s explanation for domestic violence, and as an experienced psychologist I can smell this kind of sick logic from miles away. Unfortunately, far too often this is also the explanation given by the media, politicians, and not least violent Muslims when they explain the Islamists’ aggressive reactions to cartoons and Quran-burnings. We are even responsible when Muslims run amok and commit terror after we create art or satire based on their prophet and religion. Either we cease to tease and criticize, or we must accept the consequences.

Jyllands-Posten and Kurt Westergaard have been held responsible for more than a hundred deaths — often trampled by their fellow Muslims — in the wake of the publication of the famous Mohammed cartoons. The same accusations now hit Terry Jones and his minister colleague Wayne Sapp, as eleven UN staff in Afghanistan were killed by Muslims in response to Jones’ and Sapp’s Quran-burning event. Several of the UN staff were beheaded.

But drawings and Quran burnings do not kill. They do not trample people to death and they do not chop their heads off. Only people do such things.

Jyllands-Posten, Westergaard, Jones and Sapp are not mass-murderers — and not in any indirect way, either. No artist or non-violent activist should be ashamed or feel guilty about the violent actions that others take in response to their peaceful actions. Those who believe otherwise can go and talk to the psychopathic wife beater, because they have something in common. Socialist analysis especially often victimizes dysfunctional people, and categorizes their aggressive behavior as natural and automatic reactions — and thereby supports the psychopath’s argument.

A rewrite of the U.S. National Riffle Association’s famous slogan would read: “Free speech doesn’t kill people. People kill people.”

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Counterjihad Protests

In response to the hateful things Islamic protesters write on their signs, these counterprotesters had signs displaying an admirable sense of humor:

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Cartoons, Islam, and Free Speech

THE FOLLOWING was written by James Cohen of the International Free Press Society. See the original here: Buy Cartoon.

It looks to me like governments all over the civilized world are scrambling for new legislation to deal with ancient problems. That France for example, wants to protect the freedom and rights of women, by making certain choices of clothing illegal, when they could as easily use existing laws to make Burkas and so on inconvenient beyond any reasonable utility.

In other words, stop making exceptions in law for those who want to destroy us and our freedoms, and the problem solves itself.

In that spirit, our freedom of expression has been under direct attack for sometime now. It would be easy to start the clock at the Danish cartoon crisis which may or may not be the case, but without question, the Danish cartoon riots did mark the point at which basically any Muslim or for that matter, mid-level bureaucrat could make a complaint about a soft ice-cream-cone logo and have major corporations scramble to change it or pull it from the shelves lest it offend a volatile Muslim.

So how do we stop this sprint to hand our freedoms to the most barbaric man in the room?

Easy.

Each time a threat or indeed a real act of violence is committed to force us all to sharia standards of freedom we go the other way. Too many targets and it becomes a failed effort. I say we all draw Mohamed. We make a T shirt with a blasphemy for Islam on it.

More than once I have seen university students with T shirts sporting captions such as…

“Jesus. He did it for the chicks”

It takes about as much courage to do that as it would to eat a ham sandwich in front of Mahatma Gandhi on the 40th day of a fast and do about as much good. But if enough of us showed the same willingness to fight this irrational religious authority as we do attacking the Church on the matter of Galileo and the Solar system model, we could put this problem to bed in a weekend. It is our rapid and easy submission that fuels these attacks much more than any edict within Islam itself.

In that spirit, the IFPS is bringing another limited edition Mohamed Cartoon print. This time, from the Swedish artist, Lars Vilks, who generated a nice string of fatwa’s and death threats for putting a head representing Mohamed, on a dogs body. Here is a link to a moedoggie archive:

These limited edition prints have just been made available now, and as the Kurt Westergaard, ‘Bomb-Turban’ one sold so quickly, and rumour has it, are now showing some signs of appreciation already, I would suggest you get a copy of the Vilks-toon now while there is still a supply. For your own enjoyment and potential investment, but also because in so doing, we show that each threat against freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and what I consider perhaps the most important, freedom to criticize and indeed even mock, irrational religious authority, will only serve to generate more images, more derision, and less authority for those who would set limits for us on thought, speech and expression.

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Krauthammer's Common Sense

Charles Krauthammer wrote an article called The Cowardice Of Not Calling Them Enemies. Here are some excerpts:

The following exchange occurred at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee:

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas: Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?

Attorney General Eric Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people do these things. Some of them are potentially religious-based.

A similar question arose recently in U.S. District Court when Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square attacker, pleaded guilty. Explained Shahzad: "One has to understand where I'm coming from ... I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier."

Well, that is clarifying. As was the self-printed business card of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, identifying himself as SoA: Soldier of Allah.

Holder's avoidance of the obvious continues the absurd and embarrassing refusal of the Obama administration to acknowledge who out there is trying to kill Americans and why. In fact, it has banned from its official vocabulary the terms jihadist, Islamist and Islamic terrorism.

The Pentagon report on the Fort Hood shooter runs 86 pages with not a single mention of Hasan's Islamism. It contains such politically correct inanities as "religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor."

Of course it is. Indeed, Islamist fundamentalism is not only a risk factor. It is the risk factor, the common denominator linking all the great terror attacks of this century — from 9/11 to Mumbai, from Fort Hood to Times Square, from London to Madrid to Bali. The attackers were of various national origin, occupation, age, social class, native tongue and race. The one thing that united them was the jihadist vision in whose name they acted.

Why are they so hesitant to name what it is? Because they are afraid. They are being cowed by the fear of Muslim riots on the one hand, and blind multiculturalists destroying their career on the other.

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Free Speech Silenced at the UN

An excerpt from an article called Stand Up for the Right to Criticize Religion:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated sixty years ago that "a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the highest aspiration of the common people." It was a Magna Carta for mankind — and loathed by every human rights abuser on earth. Today, the Chinese dictatorship calls it "Western", Robert Mugabe calls it "colonialist", and Dick Cheney calls it "outdated." The countries of the world have chronically failed to meet it — but the document has been held up by the United Nations as the ultimate standard against which to check ourselves. Until now.

Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants led by Saudi Arabia demanded the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to be able to think and speak freely failed to "respect" the "unique sensitivities" of the religious, they said — so they issued an alternative Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. It said you can only speak within "the limits set by the shariah [law]. It is not permitted to spread falsehood or disseminate that which involves encouraging abomination or forsaking the Islamic community." In other words: you can say anything you like, as long as it precisely what the reactionary mullahs tell you to say. The declaration makes it clear there is no equality for women, gays, non-Muslims, or apostates. It has been backed by the Vatican and a bevy of Christian fundamentalists.

Incredibly, they are succeeding. The UN's Rapporteur on Human Rights has always been tasked with exposing and shaming those who prevent free speech — including the religious. But the Pakistani delegate recently demanded that his job description be changed so he seeks out and condemns "abuses of free expression" including "defamation of religions and prophets". The council agreed — so the job has been turned on its head. Instead of condemning the people who tried to murder Salman Rushdie, they will be condemning Salman Rushdie himself.

Anything which can be deemed "religious" is no longer allowed to be a subject of discussion at the UN — and almost everything is deemed religious. Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union has tried to raise topics like the stoning of women accused of adultery or child marriage. The Egyptian delegate stood up to announce discussion of shariah "will not happen" and "Islam will not be crucified in this council" — and Brown was ordered to be silent.

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Wounding Religious Feelings — Should That Be Forbidden?

Christopher Hitchens wrote an article in Vanity Fair about the western media censoring itself out of fear of violent Muslim retaliation.

This fear is justified. Writers have been killed, publishing houses have been firebombed, and death fatwas have been declared, leaving writers and cartoonists living in fear for their lives. Hitchens writes:

Sometimes this fear—and this blackmail—comes dressed up in the guise of good manners and multiculturalism. One must not wound the religious feelings of others, many of whom are poor immigrants in our own societies. To this I would respond by pointing to a book published in 1994. It is entitled For Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Defense of Free Speech. Among its contributors is almost every writer worthy of the name in the Arab and Muslim world, ranging from the Syrian poet Adonis to the Syrian-Kurdish author Salim Barakat, to the late national bard of the Palestinians, Mahmoud Darwish, to the celebrated Turkish writers Murat Belge and Orhan Pamuk. Especially impressive and courageous was the list of 127 Iranian writers, artists, and intellectuals who, from the prison house that is the Islamic Republic, signed their names to a letter which said: “We underline the intolerable character of the decree of death that the Fatwah is, and we insist on the fact that aesthetic criteria are the only proper ones for judging works of art.… To the extent that the systematic denial of the rights of man in Iran is tolerated, this can only further encourage the export outside the Islamic Republic of its terroristic methods which destroy freedom.” In other words, the situation is the exact reverse of what the condescending multiculturalists say it is. To indulge the idea of religious censorship by the threat of violence is to insult and undermine precisely those in the Muslim world who are its intellectual cream, and who want to testify for their own liberty—and for ours. It is also to make the patronizing assumption that the leaders of mobs and the inciters of goons are the authentic representatives of Muslim opinion. What could be more “offensive” than that?

Read the whole article>>

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A New Way Jihadists Can Muzzle American's Free Speech

It’s known as “libel tourism” and here’s how it works: A book published in the United States names an individual abroad who supports terrorist groups. That individual – for the sake of discussion, let’s say he’s a Saudi petro-billionaire with a home in London – goes online and orders a few copies which arrive in the mail. He takes those books to a British attorney who files a lawsuit complaining that his client has been libeled.

The billionaire knows it will be much easier to prevail in the U.K. than it would be in an American court where the First Amendment and decades of case law provide free speech protections. (Under English law, by contrast, the burden in a libel case is on the defendant to prove his innocence – which can be impossible if he’s been using confidential sources or even just sources who don’t want to cross an ocean and take part in a courtroom battle.)

The legal costs are chump change for the billionaire, while few non-fiction writers command similar resources. If the writer chooses not to spend months living in a hotel and fighting it out in court, the case will be forfeit and he will be hit with a “default judgment.” If he doesn’t pay, he’ll never again be able to set foot in the U.K. and other countries that enforce British court judgments.

But more important is this: The message gets sent, loud and clear, to journalists, scholars and publishers, that researching and writing about terrorists and those who enable them is verboten – even in America.

>>>read the whole story

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