South Park Runs Afoul Of Islam: Score — Fatwas (And Sharia) 1, Freedom Of Speech 0
South Park Runs Afoul Of Islam: Score — Fatwas (And Sharia) 1, Freedom Of Speech 0
By
Ken Eliasberg
I hate to interrupt my 1-year report card on Obama, but so much of significance is happening and some of it requires immediate attention. I realize that at this rate, I’ll finish Obama’s 1-year report card just about in time for his 2-year report card. Actually, it really doesn’t matter; I could sum it up succinctly by just saying that he is well on his way to becoming the worst president in U.S. history; indeed, when he’s finished U.S. history itself may just be finished. That said, for those who like substantiating data — you know, anyone but lefties, who sustain themselves on fluffy feelings, Utopian dreams, and “just opinions” — I shall deal with Obama’s first year (even if it takes me a year to do it) as quickly as I can. Moving right along, we have been bombarded with happenings that are both interesting and revealing — particularly the Arizona immigration legislation (which, despite the furor, is both appropriate and quite reasonable); the revelation of highly compensated officials at the S.E.C. fiddling over pornographic web sites while the financial sector was in meltdown (fiddling to the tune of thousands of hours: actually, we are probably safer if our government people concern themselves with porn than if they deign to act in our supposed “best interests”); the court martial (and acquittal) of 2 Navy Sealsfor having been party to a third Navy Seal’s slapping a terrorist who killed a number of Americans (have we completely lost our minds, let alone any sense of proportion?); the financial failure and bailout of Greece (and its world-wide implications); and a fatwa for 2 creators of a South Park episode. For purposes of this column, I want to focus exclusively on South Park for it pointedly indicates just how far down the path of decline and dhimmitude (submission to, and, as a consequence, obeisance with respect to Islam, i.e. acceptance of second-class status in our own country) we have allowed the left to take us.
What am I talking about? Simply this, from an excellent column by Rich Trzupek at frontpagemage.com on April 28th, entitled The “South Park” Revolution:
“When the ever-offensive creators of the popular Comedy Central cartoon ‘South Park’ recently featured the Prophet Mohammed in a bear costume, they provoked a veiled death threat from some Islamist fanatics in New York and set off a firestorm about free speech in the process. The cable network’s cowardly response to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s perfidy — namely, censoring the show and bleeping out any reference to the prophet — unintentionally triggered the kind of backlash that radical, fascist, jihadists should have earned a long time ago. It is ironic that it took a cartoon to spotlight the issue so brightly.”
Trzupek goes on to highlight the real point (if that is not already apparent):
“As a Catholic, I have often been offended by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The same can be said by anyone who practices Judaism, Buddhism, Hindism, or just about any other ‘ism’ under the sun. The difference is that ‘South Park’ could poke fun at Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Krishna, Joseph Smith, David Blaine, or practically any other religious or cult figure, without any fear of repercussion. There is, of course, one exception. Muslim fundamentalists can’t abide it when the prophet Mohammed’s teachings are questioned, much less when the prophet himself is mocked. For a religion as certain that it has a direct pipeline to the absolute, unalterable word of God as Islam is, too many Muslims are awfully — and too often violently — insecure about that point.”
This is an incredibly important matter, and this, hopefully, may well be the time when we address it. South Park is not an isolated event, and there is nothing aberrational about it. We have a long history of insane reactions by Islamic fundamentalists to any slight -real or imaginary; significant or insignficant — to their religion. Now I am not for a moment saying that indelicate remarks about any religion are polite, courteous, or pleasant. What I am saying is that this is America, and our right to free speech is the most important of our rights. And the right is aimed only at offensive speech; no Constitutional protection is necessary for inoffensive speech. Our Founding Fathers, in giving us this right, contemplated just such indignities — again, otherwise, no such protection would be necessary.
I’ll tell you whose speech is a violation of everything this country stands for — it is the speech of the Islamist nut cases who issued this death threat (“fatwa” in Islamic terms). We cannot - indeed, we must not- allow this kind of conduct to go on. If those “peaceful” Muslims we so often hear about are incapable of reigning in the fundamentalists in their midst — you know, the guys who they allege are taking liberties with, and, in the course of doing so, doing violence to, the teachings of the Prophet and the message of Allah, then we have to take it out of their hands and put an end to it now — not later, right now, before it becomes an acceptable practice and we all become dhimmis. That is, either Islam has a problem with certain of its constituent elements, or we have a problem with Islam.
When I speak of a long history, to what am I referring? For purposes of this column I shall go no further back than that whack job, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran (and the direct result of Jimmy Carter’s inspired leadership (and abandonment of the Shah)) who issued one of those fatwas to Salmon Rushdie in 1989 for his authorship of The Satanic Verses (although were I inclined to go much further back, I do not believe that I would find that freedom of speech has ever flourished to any significant degree in any Islamic country). Rushdie, a Muslim, residing in Great Britain, published The Satanic Verses (the “Verses”) in 1988, and, in addition to the Ayatollah’s fatwa, it provoked denunciations, protests, and riots throughout the Muslim world. The Verses, inspired in part by the life of Muhammad, while allegedly drawing on Qur’anic verses, was a novel set in contemporary times. In any event, it provoked a tsunami of rage in the Muslim world. Not being too active in politics at the time, I dismissed the event as the aberrational actions of a lunatic, who, through an unfortunate turn of events, had been allowed to seize control of a contemporary civilization. Also, having spent time with some Iranians while vacationing in Spain during my tour of duty in the U.S. Air Force, I had gained the impression that Persia (Iran) was a bit more evolved than your typical Islamic country. Khomeini changed all that. Also, I naively thought that no religion would allow any of its teachers to counsel violence, mayhem, and murder, let alone practice it so enthusiastically. I was wrong, and ensuing events would clearly demonstrate just how wrong I was (to be continued).