Let’s talk about the Garland, Texas attack by enforcers of Islamic law. Not the physical attack by two Muslim enforcers of Islamic law, but rather the figurative, hardly less virulent attacks by mainly Christian enforcers of Islamic law on cartoon contest organizer Pamela Geller, free speech activist and head of American Freedom Defense Initiative. Judging by the intensity of these ongoing attacks, Geller, a person of exceptional courage, is also extremely effective.
As with all things jihad, the physical attack on Geller’s day-long Mohammed cartoon event, which temporarily secured a small piece of the public square where Americans who so desired could exercise their speech free from Islamic law, followed patterns as old as Islam and as current as the latest news cycles all over the globe. For this reason, it is hard to imagine anyone was shocked by this characteristically Islamic attempt to kill rebels against Islamic law — surely not in the way that earlier, pre-Islamic generations of Americans might have been shocked, perhaps as late as 1989.
That was the year the great Western powers accepted and accommodated Iran’s “fatwa” — Islamic death sentence — against a British citizen named Salman Rushdie for publishing a novel mullahs in Tehran deemed “blasphemous” to Islam. (“Blasphemy” is a crime punishable by death, according to mainstream Islamic law. Remember Obama’s 2012 admonition: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”) People forget, but not only did Rushdie then enter into a state-provided, hidden security bubble in England, but riots ensued, books were burned, bookstores were bombed, translators and publishers were assaulted and even killed — and that’s in the West, a.k.a (once upon a time) Christendom.
After Rushdie in 1989, after the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, after 16-year-old Ari Halberstam was shot and killed while traveling in a Jewish school bus across the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994 … (this was not the beginning of Islamic jihad in the West, nor, of course, was it the end), there has been a widespread expectation that Muslims will kill for Islam.
For what reason?
The answer, stunningly, seems to eludes Geller’s second-wave media attackers, who come at her from the Right as well as the Left, and who, to my mind, pose far more danger to the life of liberty in the remnant republic than two thugs with guns, now thankfully deceased.
The answer is simple. Jihadists fight and kill and terrorize to extend and implement Islam’s law, even, or even especially, on non-Muslims. Geller’s media attackers, however, seem not to know this — dim-itude; or, worse, they don’t care —dhimmitude.
Core tenets of Islam’s law prohibit criticism of Islam, of Mohammed (even of other Muslims). Accordingly, such criticism of Islam or Mohammed, very much including political cartoons, constitutes “apostasy,” and apostasy is a crime in Islam punishable by death. Indeed, top Islamic leader Yusef al-Qaradawi has declared that without the death penalty for apostasy, Islam would not even exist today!
What we are faced with, then, is a belief system in which silence is the price of survival. Leaving Islam = death. Silence = submission. Submission = Islam. (Islam means not “peace,” as George W. Bush told us, but “submission.”) Such existential blackmail is as far as you can possibly get from “Americanism” in the best sense of the word.
As demonstrated by the left-to-right media frenzy over Geller (I don’t think even Sarah Palin was subject to such poisonous headlines); by emotional appeals for silence/dhimmitude (see Fox’s Martha McCallum here); by the strict adherence of media outlets (Breitbart a noble exception) and politicians to sharia rules against *daring* to display *forbidden* political cartoon commentary on Islam and Mohammed; by media/political non-concern over the news that American cartoonist and ex-Muslim Bosch Fawstin has gone into hiding, even the news that ISIS has called for Geller’s “slaughter”; it is clearer than ever before that the public square in America is not protected by guardians of American life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but rather policed by dutiful, also vociferous enforcers of Islamic law.
America is in crisis.
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