Even as Islamic violence against American embassies swells around
the world, and evidence emerges of its coordination and premeditation, our own
government and media continue to insist that the source of it all is an
hilariously incompetent YouTube film that offended Muslim hair-trigger
sensitivities.
Americans abroad have been killed this last week. The black
flag of jihad has been raised over our Egyptian embassy. Our Libyan ambassador
was sodomized, murdered, mutilated and dragged through the streets. As with
Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses,
the Danish cartoon riots, and Geert Wilders’ film Fitna, the Islamic uproar ostensibly due to the micro-budgeted The Innocence of Muslims has been
riotous and murderous, but the blame is once again falling on the “provocateur,”
not the rabid mobs looting and killing in the name of cultural sensitivity. Thanks
to a president who always sides with the Islamic world over America, our
kneejerk official response was to blame the seeming religious bigotry of the filmmaker.
Our State Department, which is in “meltdown,” as Charles
Krauthammer put it, has been scrambling to find the right wording for a
response to all this, culminating in spokesman Jay Carney’s laughable
pronouncement that “this is not a case of protests directed at the United States
writ large or at U.S. policy; this is in response to a video that is offensive
to Muslims.” So far, our official responses are all variations on the theme of
“Nothing excuses this violence, but
we also strongly condemn religious bigotry.” This neatly echoes the left’s
attitude toward free speech in general these days, which is “Sure I believe in
free speech, but hate speech must be
punished.”
The OIC, or Organization
of Islamic Cooperation, is the
world’s largest Muslim assembly, consisting of 57 member states (you know, the same number of U.S. states
candidate Obama campaigned in). Its primary aim is “conducting a large-scale
worldwide effort to confront Islamophobia” and make it an international crime. “We sent a clear message to the West
regarding the red lines that should not be crossed,” the OIC leader arrogantly
declared after the shrewdly orchestrated Muslim mayhem around the world
protesting such infidel abominations as the Danish cartoons.
“Red lines” – a phrase reminiscent of Samuel
Huntington’s famous observation that “Islam has bloody borders.” Except
that the red lines the OIC is referring to aren’t geographical – they
are the ever-tightening limits that Muslim fundamentalists are imposing to
choke off our freedoms. Free speech “is not a value that the Muslims share with
America as a whole,” declared
the American group Revolution Muslim in response to an offending episode of
Comedy Central’s satirical show South
Park two years ago.
It’s also not valued by our administration, either. The
government has asked YouTube to
review the 14-minute The Innocence of
Muslims trailer and determine whether
it violates the site's terms of service. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed his concerns over the repercussions for our
soldiers abroad, who are already in grave danger from our own military
leadership’s suicidal counter-insurgency idiocy. Dempsey urged
controversial anti-Islam Pastor Terry Jones to consider withdrawing his support
for the film – which goes to show that if all it takes is one Florida pastor’s
opinion to set off the entire Muslim world’s bloodthirsty outrage against
America, maybe they’re the problem and not him.
Our news media too continue
to spin the unrest as the fault of the film and focus
on the filmmaker behind all this cultural insensitivity, going so far as to post
a picture of his home and car with the license plate clearly visible – because
as any good multiculturalist knows, if we just show zero tolerance toward those
who offend murderous bullies, our enemies will stop killing us.
Law enforcement piled on, with the FBI digging behind the
pseudonymous name of the filmmaker
and tracking him down, reportedly
out of concern for his safety (simultaneously
sending an unmistakable message that if you make a film that offends Muslims,
the FBI will come looking for you). Sheriff's deputies were sent to remove
him from his California home.
As FrontPage’s Caroline Glick points out, the film was not
the cause of the unrest, but a pretext. The storming of our embassies and the
attack on our ambassador in Libya were premeditated and carefully planned, down
to an Egyptian television station’s airing of the year-old film to enrage the
masses. Remember how the Danish cartoons only became controversial months after
they were first published, when Muslim provocateurs disseminated them after
adding even more offensive cartoons of their own to insure Islamic outrage?
Instead of denouncing the anti-American violence, the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt called for protests against The Innocence of Muslims, which “goes far beyond all reasonable
boundaries of the freedoms of opinion and expression.” And who wants the right
to determine what those reasonable boundaries are? Why, the Muslim Brotherhood,
of course. Echoing the OIC’s previous condemnation of free speech, President
Mohamed Morsi said
that the Muslim prophet Muhammad “is a red line nobody can touch.”
The time is long overdue for Americans to stop holding up
“cultural sensitivity” as a Western value, because our tolerance and our
sensitivity are being abused by a supremacist culture which has only violent
contempt for our civilization, our freedom, and our values. It’s time for us to
slam the door on the Obama administration’s efforts to accommodate the OIC’s blasphemy
laws. It’s time for us to draw our own “red lines that should not be crossed,” and
stop placating religious totalitarians.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 9/18/12)
