Tag Archives: Free Speech

The Future Belongs to Charlie Hebdo

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” were the words of President Barack Obama, before the United Nations. And for twelve people at the office of satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, massacred by gunmen today in Paris, there will indeed be no future.

The two gunmen reportedly forced their way into the magazine offices, yelling “allahu akbar” (God is Greater), and opened fire. There are reports coming in that the gunmen instructed survivors, “You say to the media that it was al-Qaeda in Yemen.” If this is true, it would be a realization of a threat made against the newspaper’s editor by a 2013 edition of the AQAP produced “Inspire Magazine.”

yeswecaninspire

Each gunmen wore a black ski mask, and were armed with kalashnikov rifles. A video shot by a nearby bystander shows  two gunmen emerge from the building and engaged a French police officer with more gunfire. After the policeman fell, a gunmen executed him with an additional round at close range, before the two attackers fled in a stolen vehicle.

The same White House which is now condemning the attack, had previously gone out of its way to condemn the cartoons published by the magazine back in 2012:

“We are aware that a French magazine published cartoons featuring a figure resembling the prophet Muhammad, and obviously we have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this,” [Then White House Spokesman Jay] Carney told reporters during a midday press briefing at the White House. “We know these images will be deeply offensive to many and have the potential be be inflammatory,” Carney said in a prepared statement. Putting satirical cartoons on the same level as terrorist murder is exactly the problem.

Unfortunately, this is not merely a matter of spinelessness, but spinelessness as official policy.

The Obama administration has been deeply involved in pursuing an agenda, promoted by the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which equates speech which offends with direct incitement to murder. That effort, known as Resolution 16/18, after the joint U.S.-Egyptian resolution which introduced it, or the “Istanbul Process,” by the series of  high-level meetings held between the State Department and OIC members, is explicitly intended by Islamic states to prohibit what they describe as “defamation of religion” including insulting Islam’s prophet.

White House officials were already uttering the standard reassurances that despite the clear effort by the gunmen to enforce Sharia strictures on Blasphemy, this attack may not be terrorism, and of course, taking the submissive posture that Islam is an inherently and indisputably a peaceful religion (which is not the same thing as recognizing that many individual Muslims are themselves peaceful people.)

The attack on Charlie Hebdo is only one front in the war on free expression perpetuated in the name of enforcing Sharia blasphemy laws. The staff of Charlie Hebdo are martyrs to free speech, but they are not alone. Over 35 Christians in Pakistan were lynched last year over the mere rumor of possible blasphemy, including a couple which was burned alive. In 2012, a Saudi blogger tweeted a comment questioning his own commitment to belief in Mohammed’s prophethood. Death threats followed. He fled to Malaysia, but was deported under an Interpol Red notice to Saudi Arabia, where he faced execution for blasphemy (he was eventually freed after almost two years in prison.)

But it is not only in the Middle East. In The United Kingdom, an 85-year old woman was charged by police after yelling outside a Chatham-area mosque,  expressing anger regarding the brutal massacre of British Army Drummer Lee Rigby.  Here in the United States, Terry Jones (whose face adorns the Al Qaeda hit list), was directly castigated by President Obama and General David Petraeus in an attempt to prevent the Pastor from conducting a public burning of the koran in an act of protest (a perhaps distasteful but legally permissible act of free expression.) In 2012, following the attack on the Benghazi consulate where four Americans were killed, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told one victim’s father that the maker of a film mocking Mohammed would be jailed as a result. As indeed, it turned out that the man, Nakoula Bassely Nakoula, was indeed jailed. Molly Norris, a cartoonist was forced into hiding, after she  attempted to establish “Every One Draw Mohammed Day” in defense of the creators of the TV Show South Park being censored for attempting to do so. In 2010, Christians were arrested in Dearborn, Michigan for “breach of peace” during a peaceful attempt to preach to Muslims at an Arab Festival. (They were eventually released and the city apologized following a lawsuit.) And there remains, of course, the infamous, Danish Cartoons, whose authors have repeatedly and continuously faced assaults and threats ever since.

Whichever jihadist group was responsible for the attack of Charlie Hebdo bears the ultimate responsibility. But there is a culpability also for those who have hinted that violence and threats of violence will encourage us to abandon our commitment to free expression, or established a policy which says that the West is amendable to surrendering cherished freedom rather than risk “offense.” That culpability remains until political and media leaders can say unapologetically, “The Future belongs to Charlie Hebdo.”

 

CAIR again turns to Saudi TV to promote new initiative: “Islam for Journalists”

Terror-tied Muslim Brotherhood front group the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is hawking a new “resource” to keep journalists from running afoul of politically sanctioned speech codes when reporting on Islam and Muslims.

As with CAIR’s much-heralded “Islamophobia Report” release last October, the only TV news outlet to cover the story–at least the only one CAIR saw fit to post on their YouTube channel–was KSA-2 TV, the official English-language network of the regime of Saudi Arabia, owned and operated by the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information.

“Islam for Journalists” is co-edited by Lawrence Pintak, whose works include Seeds of Hate: How America’s Flawed Middle East Policy Ignited the Jihad.  The journalist primer recommends “Experts” including Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Khan, the married duo behind the push to erect a mega-mosque adjacent to Ground Zero (p.274, ASMA).

While a second party produced this guide, CAIR has released many similar publications meant to sanitize speech and render criticism of Islamist activities and goals impossible.  They include guides for health care workers, employers and educators.

The guide for employers, meant to create a “culturally-sensitive work-place environment,” is perhaps most disturbing.  One need look no further than Fort Hood jihadist Nidal Hassan to see the results of employers and supervisors cowed by political correctness and unable to make the most simple judgments about who or what they deem to be threats to their employees.

The shackles put on journalists, though seemingly less acute, serve to deny policymakers and the public the opportunity to examine the most critical threats to our society and devise policies to counter them.  This inability to describe the threat neuters a free citizen’s ability to confront the threat.  It seems this is what CAIR is banking on.

The Istanbul Process, The Missing Piece of the Filmmaker Puzzle

It was heartening to see Rich Lowry in Politico making note of the one largely unspoken element of the Benghazi Cover-up which is going largely unreported. Namely that a man sits in prison because those in the State Department apparently chose to eliminate terrorism from the talking point associated with the Benghazi aftermath. Lowry notes:

Instead, Nakoula ended up the patsy in a tawdry coverup. The State Department Operations Center reported to Washington immediately that the the Benghazi attack was an assault carried out by Islamic militants. The falsehoods about Benghazi weren’t a product of the fog of war; they were the product of the fog of politics. Desperate to minimize the attack and deflect responsibility, Team Obama evaded and obfuscated.

Over at the blog Popehat, Ken White takes exception to those who have defended the “Innocence of Muslims” trailer maker, writing:

Is Nakoula in federal prison because he made the “Innocence of Muslims” video? Superficially, perhaps, in the sense that his behavior may have escaped detection if he hadn’t become famous. It’s even possible that someone in the Obama Administration tipped off — or pressured — the Probation Office about his conduct. (If that’s what happened, there ought to be a Congressional investigation.) But Nakoula’s conduct is the sort that would absolutely be pursued if detected by his Probation Office and would routinely result in a revocation of supervised release and a return to federal prison. People saying otherwise don’t know what they are talking about or don’t care, or both.
Ken notes that most of us who have been vocal about Nakoula’s imprisonment aren’t legal experts and haven’t spent time working in the parole system.

Fair enough.

But both Rich and Ken actually manage to miss the key factor, without which Nakoula’s arrest is indeed perhaps unremarkable. And that factor revolves around  UN resolution 16/18,  The Istanbul Process, and the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (formerly Conference). For those who think this is an irrelevant distraction to the Benghazi discussion:

It goes to motive, your honor.  (I’m not a lawyer, but I heard that in a TV courtroom once.)

UN Resolution 16/18 was jointly introduced by the United States and Egypt*. At the time some argued that it was a walk back from previous OIC “Defamation of Islam” resolutions. However, the OIC made clear afterwards it considered the resolution a resounding success, and indeed, that it represented a step forward in their effort to effectively criminalize “Islamophobia.” The Resolution specifically calls for “Adopting measures to criminalize incitement to imminent violence based on religion or belief;”.

Worse still, by participating with the OIC in the Istanbul Process to implement the resolution, the United States has effectively done the same. Speaking about the Istanbul Process, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said:

“we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor,” she said. (emphasis added)

This adds new relevance to Clinton’s statement to Charles Woods about seeing the filmmaker punished. The filmmaker was not just a useful patsy. Secretary Clinton was essentially already on record calling for men like Nakoula to face legal consequences,  even before she, or anyone else, knew who he was.

The arrest of “Innocence” Filmmaker has to be viewed within the context of other such events where this Administration has intervened against those who have criticized Islam. Intimidating phone calls from top military officials to troublesome pastors. The punishment of soldiers who dispose of the Quran, despite that no violation of the USMJ has occurred. Previously, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer raised the possibility that when it comes to actions that may offend Muslims, it’s like crying ‘fire’ in a theater.  The argument that one should not be free to criticize Islam because the result may be violence was already being built before Benghazi, exactly as the OIC intended.

And before Clinton’s words calling for Nakoula’s arrest were revealed by Charles Woods, MSNBC commentators called for Nakoula to be tried for murder.  The ground work for such a demand had already been laid.

Far from being irrelevant, the free speech issue is central to the question of what happened in Benghazi and why it was covered up.

Even if its correct to say that Nakoula ought to have been brought in for parole violations even if Benghazi had never occurred, the fact remains that punishing people like him, whether its through existing legal tools, where ever available, or extralegal tools, such as “peer-pressure and shaming”  is now effectively U.S. policy, because of this administration’s decision to pursue Resolution 16/18 and the Istanbul Process.

And that makes the filmmaker’s arrest extremely political.
*Correction: Resolution 16/18 was submitted by Pakistan on behalf of the OIC in 2011. The U.S-Egypt resolution, submitted in 2009 played a role in reviving the OIC’s efforts which had faced previous setback from Western nations at the U.N and paved the way for 16/18.