In a recent column I wrote for Irish Examiner USA, I mentioned an email I received that was politically correct but that I thought was very funny. I debated including it in the column but decided against it for the sake of my publisher.
Apparently we’re no longer allowed to laugh at anything remotely unflattering to ourselves or certain minorities, and that’s not only a shame, it’s downright dangerous.
Joan Rivers used to tell jokes about Italians; Don Rickles insulted everybody, and Jackie Mason still tells jokes about Jews. Now it seems as if some Hispanics are now being encouraged to be as testy over slights as are certain Muslims over perceived disses of the prophet Mohammed.
Here at Big Journalism, however, the mission should be to write about things too edgy for the MSM so here it is and if you’re black or Hispanic and get offended, you need to check your humor level. You may be a few quarts low.
It appears that Fox News is now caving in to President Obama who wants the network to have more blacks and Hispanics on it. Therefore beginning next week FoxNews will be airing “America’s Most Wanted” twice a week.
Because of the constraints against free speech the world has become a humorless place. We get offended at everything. I met the great Mark Steyn at a seminar about libel tourism which is a term used to describe the filing of libel lawsuits in countries with plaintiff-friendly libel laws, for the purpose of intimidating writers and commentators and their publishers and suppressing their free speech. He had been cited by the Canadian Human Rights Commission for remarks he had made in his book, America Alone. The Canadian Islamic Conference denounced it as Islamophobic yet Steyn had been quoting Muslims. Steyn told the conference that Holocaust denial laws gave everybody the right to be offended.
I wrote about my own dreary experience with the hypersensitive for The New Individualist,
MSNBC senior correspondent Lawrence O’Donnell made a refreshingly honest admission when he was interviewed on the Hugh Hewitt radio show last December. He had been relentlessly bashing Mitt Romney and his Mormon faith when Hewitt asked if he would say the same things about Muhammad as he was saying about Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion. O’Donnell answered candidly, “I would like to criticize Islam much more than I do publicly, but I’m afraid for my life if I do.” He then went on to say that Mormons were the nicest people in the world. “They’ll never take a shot at me. Those other people, I’m not going to say a word about them.”
I can’t blame the man for his strong survival instincts, given the insane reactions in other countries to even minor criticisms of the prophet. Still, this is America, land of the free and the First Amendment; so, while I’m not a particularly reckless woman, I felt secure in objecting to a proposed Arabic public school in New York City last year.
I was soon to feel a lot less secure… phone calls poured in from the various media outlets. CNN’s Paula Zahn show wanted me to appear, as did Glenn Beck. Radio shows in New York, California, and Seattle wanted to interview me. I was vilified on the internet, which was nothing new, since my conservative commentary always drives the left wing crazy, and their criticism always borders on the puerile and obscene. I have been called the N, S, and C words, and my last name always inspires morons to inject obvious insults into their scintillating correspondence.
But the type of mail I was getting in response to my Arab public school column was different, and it influenced my decision not to appear on camera. On the day the Times article appeared, I received an email from a reader in Europe so viciously obscene and graphically detailed in expressing the author’s desires for my fate that this magazine’s editor has decided not to reprint it here, in the interests of good taste.
I was taken aback by how evil and threatening the email was. I shared it with Daniel Pipes, who has been writing for over thirty years about the threat of Islamic jihad and who I assumed was probably used to this type of malevolence. He told me, however, that he had never received anything as vile as the one I received.
We should speak freely while we still can.