I can see a problem there, can't you?
For instance, a local CBS news outfit was quick to carp that Muhammad Art Exhibit Organizer’s Ads Ousted From Philly Buses noting that the "provocative ads" which Pamella Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) had won a court battle to have displayed, were being removed from Philadelphia buses after a month-long contract expired (as in expired, not pulled), but they were a bit slower to call the terrorists who tried to attack Pamella Geller's AFDI event, terrorists, almost passively noting that bad things happened to them while trying to get inside a building:
"Nadir Soofi and Elton Simpson were killed after firing on officers outside Geller’s event Sunday. A guard was wounded. Soofi and Simpson originally attempted to get inside the building."While the Washington Post 'reported' what the discreditable leftist hate group, Southern Poverty Law Center had to say:
"Heidi Beirich, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s watchdog division, told CNN on Monday that although Geller’s activities may fall within the bounds of the First Amendment, they are considered “cruel and unfair” because “she doesn’t make distinctions” between mainstream Islam and militant factions."As did NBC
"The event was sponsored by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and attended by its president and co-founder, Pamela Geller — who is also president of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). Both are listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center., NBC News also wondered,
Why cartoons?"Why cartoons"?!! Really? And who the hell didn't immediately know that these terrorists were specifically targeting their event?! Our media, that's who didn't. Look at this one, from the Washington Post, via MSN
It was not immediately clear if the gunmen were specifically targeting the event. However, the publication of cartoons of Muhammad has triggered violence in the past. Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's publication of a series of Muhammad drawings in September 2005 led to the burning of the Danish flag and attacks on Danish embassies around the Middle East. Cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was attacked at his home in 2010 by a Somali Muslim carrying an ax and a knife.
Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo, which repeatedly published Muhammad cartoons, was attacked on Jan. 7 by armed gunmen who killed 12 people."
"Event organizer offers no apology after thwarted attack in TexasAnd this level of misdirection and obfuscation is coming from the same people who gushed outpourings of sentiment and outrage following the islamist's murderous assault upon the 'satirical' paper, Charlie Hebdo, the same hordes who filled not only the streets of Paris with countless supporters (minus one POTUS), but around the world as well, all stood in solidarity with "Charlie", but those same people are not only turning away from Pamela Geller's cartoonists in Texas, but demanding apologies from her, as well as accusing her of provoking the attack.
Pamela Geller, the woman behind the Texas cartoon contest attacked by two gunmen late Sunday, knew what she was doing when she staged the controversial event featuring irreverent depictions of the prophet Muhammad in Garland, Tex."
What is the charge? Cruel and unusual cartooning? The mind boggles.
Could it be that the Garland, TX event just lacked the emotionally sympathetic impact that the Paris event had? Perhaps, after all, unlike in Texas, the French police were unarmed and unable to prevent numerous people from being slaughtered before the terrorists were... so sure, a sympathetic 'Je suis Charlie', "I stand with Charlie" - was a natural response to unarmed people being unjustly attacked and murdered.
But what is not natural, is that those same people the world over, didn't let loose with a "Yippee ki yay M*F'er!" when the attempted attack upon a cartoon art show in Texas was immediately stopped on the terrorists being shot dead by an armed a 30 yr veteran Texas policeman (don't mess with Texas).
Apparently "Standing with Charlie!" means just exactly that and no more - standing with Charlie. And mayyybe under special circumstances, with Bruce. But Pamela Geller? Iraqi Christians? Jews? Nope, the response is: 'Sorry folks, we're just "Standing with Charlie!" here, just putting out some sympathy, not looking to offend anyone; you understand.'
I sure do. The problem is, as with most natural responses, there is much more that needs to be gotten, but once you do get it, you should begin to realize that mindlessly following such natural responses... can quickly put you on the wrong side of the issue.
Where to stand?
If you do bother giving the matter more consideration than sympathy, there are two very basic questions to begin with asking, What, and Why.
1) The What, is what you probably notice first - what is the nature of the saying itself: "I stand with Charlie!"... stand with... what does that mean? And before going further, have you looked at what you'd be standing with, with 'Charlie Hebdo'? Have you ever seen Charlie Hebdo's cartoons? From the little that I have seen, they were worthless, trite, shallow, and crude - not nearly humorous enough to compensate for its juvenile scrawlings, which succeed mostly in making South Park seem positively high-brow by comparison.
- What does it mean to 'Stand with...', and
- Why should you stand, or do, anything at all?
Do you want to stand with that? I sure as heck don't. And yet such attacks cannot be tolerated... so there must be something more important involved here than what was being drawn or said, and who by, Right?
And how many of these events are you supposed to stand around with? Remember, it's islamists who've been behind these events, so you know that the roll call is long and getting longer every day - are you really going to recall, and stand with, every single one of them? How many can you recall, and what would it accomplish if you could recall them all?
It seems a plain fact that if you expect any productive resolution to the wrongs that have been done, simply by empathizing with the numerous victims and by commemorating these numerous events, you're not only in error, but you are enabling and emboldening those who commit such wrongs. It is apologists such as these who are the ones that are provoking further offenses, not those who are standing up for their reasonable rights, for weakness in defense of what is of great value - or irritation - is provocative to those who act by way of force, rather than reason.
Maybe we can learn something useful by leaving today's headlines behind for the moment and thinking back over the incidents of our own history. From 9/11 and on back to Pearl Harbor, and on back before that to the Lusitania, and back even further to the Alamo; leaving aside the particulars of the moment, the responses to those events were all shaped with a similar goal in mind. We didn't say "I stand with the Alamo!", we said
"Remember the Alamo!"What was it we wanted to remember it for? To empathize with the slaughtered? To commemorate the tragedy of the date? No, we wanted to remember the outrage that had been done to us, we wanted to remember the vileness of it, we wanted to keep the utter unacceptability of it in the forefront of our minds, in order to focus our attentions upon it so that we'd be sure to decisively respond to that attack ASAP. Not simply to avenge the slaughter (another natural, though counter productive, reaction), but to respond to it in such a way as to ensure that the perpetrators would never attempt any such thing, ever again. That is, after all, the idea behind: 'Never Again!'.
Unfortunately while that historic response was once second-nature to Americans in particular, and to the West in general, it is becoming harder and harder to find in the world today.
2) And that leads us to the second basic question to be asked: Why are these attacks worthy of a response? Were they simply acts of violence in the workplace? Why were these people attacked?
Because of cartoons? Come on, you're going to have to do better than an 'informational text' level of reading these events, and even going down to the STEM level is too shallow as well; if you want to get to the roots of the matter, you're going to have to engage your mind and reason the matter through. Because what the islamists actually attacked is in all of these cases something that we as Westerners all have a vital share in, which is another reason why standing 'with' some particular set of victims, entirely misses and distracts us from the importance of what these barbarians actually attacked - it wasn't individuals or their actions, but a higher and more central concept, without which there would be no West in general, and certainly no America (hint hint).
The key to 'Why', is the phrase which most of the supporters and talking heads have been mouthing their support of in regards to Charlie Hebdo, and reluctantly, even dismissively, in regards to Pamella Geller's event, and that is of course:
Freedom of Speech!Freedom? Free from who? Free from what? Speech for what?
Pursue such questions with a degree of intellectual honesty and integrity, and you can't help but begin to see what is so deeply offensive about those who turn away from those standing up for the concept of Freedom of Speech. Pursue that line of thought, and you'll soon discover what our united response should, and must be - if you want to remain free to speak as you choose, and speak to who you choose to, that is. For if you cannot express your opinions, then you surely make thinking upon them pointless, and if you can't think or speak your mind, then you couldn't possibly associate with who you choose to either, for those associations represent your thoughts and words in action every bit as much as writing an op-ed or drawing a cartoon do, and much more so. And if history offers up any lessons worth learning, it is that if you retreat from thinking, speaking and associating as you choose, then those empowered by your withdrawal, will do their best to gather the power to themselves to forbid you from reclaiming that ability for yourself.
Freedom of Speech and the liberty to live your own life, are inseparable, and those who expect apologies for defending it, owe all of humanity an apology, and much more.
But as those questions are rarely pursued, certainly not in school, and rarely in popular culture, the resulting weakness has incited remarks by everyone from the press, to academics, to the Pope himself, saying of those who spoke their minds,
"They should have expected it."Ya know what? With irony firmly in cheek, to those saying 'they should have known better' or demanding an apology for speaking freely, I'd really like to pop 'em one in the nose.
Here we have a bunch of people, sheltered in the safety of the West, who have apparently not given much thought to what those words Freedom of Speech mean and entail. They may say the words at the drop of a hat, but they show no sign of having thought about what is meant by them, or what must be required of those who wish to freely say them. Could they have given even a moments thought to what it means on the face of it? Glance around this post, it doesn't take much to consider it, and yet they show no sign of ever having considered 'Free from___?'! Surely everyone else who has pursued those questions to even an inches worth of depth, will have good reason to be offended by these Vichy-westerners retreat and capitulation.
How dare they elevate the deliberate schemes of barbarians, to the rarefied level of a response which civilized people should have expected!
We do not need to stand with Charlie, or even with Pamella for that matter, instead we need to stand up for, and defend against any such attack, upon anybody, because all of the numerous particulars point to a vital principle which every aspect of Western Civilization depends upon being vigorously defended, and that is far more important than the particular wrongs that have been done in Garland TX, Paris, FR, or any where else in the world. What we should clearly see, now, especially after these latest events, is that it needs to be made very clear, that standing 'with' Charlie, is something that should not be done, instead we must all stand united against those who would silence any amongst us, and especially against those who would excuse their doing it!
Standing with those who were killed, rather than against those who killed them, is less than worthless, it is counter-productive. If you understand that a wrong was committed which must be addressed, and if you understand the nature of what that wrong was, then the civilized response, and the responsibility of a civil society, is first and foremost to eliminate the ability of the perpetrators to commit such barbaric acts towards your people, it means to take the words never again to heart.
The notion that there could be some reasonable 'cause' for the attacks, which the victims should have expected, is, technically speaking: Bullshit.
'The motive hunting of motiveless malignancy'
The English poet and critic Coleridge had a handy phrase for describing the villain Iago, of Shakespeare's play Othello. Iago had a grievance for every occasion, he swore multiple motivations for his villainous actions, motives which as with our our islamists today, changed with who it was he was busily justifying his actions to at the moment. Coleridge perfectly described these 'causes' as:
'the motive hunting of motiveless malignancy'The motive is even less than a pretext, not even an excuse, it is more like a passive aggressive attack for being caught while knowingly engaging in purposefully bad behavior. Is it surprising that a barbarian plots to kill you because of the offense he so artfully cultivates towards you? No, no more so than it surprises me that an as yet unmannerd child will seek to snatch away another child's shiny new present, or will even begin throwing a tantrum if he's displeased with having to brush his teeth. But under no circumstances would I ever consider that the child's outbursts were caused by a parent giving the other child that gift or by telling their child to brush their teeth - indeed, saying or intimating such a thing would make it very difficult for that child to ever grow up.
Is that a fair comparison?
No, it's not, because a child, unlike the islamist, has the excuse and innocence of being a child; the child hasn't yet had the experience or opportunity or obligation to learn any more civilized behavior than that of a child, but the child is at least in the process of learning it, and their reaching maturity will be marked by having learned it.
The islamists who have no such excuse, are doing no such thing.
They have no intention of learning that the first response to an immature provocation is holding your temper, not excusing it; they have no intention of learning that that is what you Should do,and they have no intention of learning that that is the civil, and civilized, thing to do. Or put more pointedly and accurately, learning and habituating that lesson into your character is the mannered, polite, decent, charitable - Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian thing to do, and that is the heart and soul of what they attack why they attack it.
So here's a question for everyone from the press to the Pope, why are you trying to excuse the islamists from having to learn something which we still , even in the age of honey boo-boo, consider to be a basic expectation of a decent and well behaved child? And why on earth do you consider islamists incapable of such fundamentals as are expected of even a child in the West? Who is really insulting who here?
Or more to the point, why are you trying to punish us for those virtues which the Islamists lack?
For the benefit of those who have learned their manners, and still find themselves having doubts, proper doubts, realize that it isn't sufficient to simply be troubled by them, it is your responsibility to consider the matter, to question, examine and question again, both what it is that is being said and what goes hushed and unsaid, question your assumptions, and question it all again, until those doubts are faced up to and satisfied.
If you still have doubts, then maybe you need to ask some questions about what others seem so sure about.
What do you get when you mix together 'Cannot' and 'Should Not', manners, ethics, social acceptability and law? Chaos, of course.
Even worse than those who 'Stand with Charlie' yet 'Run from Pamela', are those who have accused both of provoking the attacks upon them. Typical of these sentiments were those that were made by the Pope after the Charlie Hebdo attack, which has required entire PR flak teams to explain and clarify his statements (and most others he makes). Take a look and ask yourself how well could he have considered the meaning of what he was so dramatically and confidently saying:
'If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,' Francis said, throwing a pretend punch his way.This...coming as it does from the moral leader of the most philosophic church in Christendom, especially following the stature of the two preceding popes, is embarrassingly amateurish, and reveals his inclination towards making inept, confused and, IMHO, disingenuous attempts at seeming 'more real':
'It's normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.'
... But the Pope said there was a limit to free speech when it concerned offending someone's religious beliefs. He said: 'There are so many people who speak badly about religions or other religions, who make fun of them, who make a game out of the religions of others. They are provocateurs. And what happens to them is what would happen to Dr Gasparri if he says a curse word against my mother. There is a limit.'
- 'If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,' Francis said, throwing a pretend punch his way.
If I got in your face and insulted you or your mother, your heated response would be understandable, but barring my using actual 'fighting words', unless I actually threatened, punched or swung at you, then your response, even in the heat of the moment, would be limited to words as well - IOW you would not be lawfully justified in punching me in the nose for what came out of my mouth. Sure, any reasonable person would have understood your reaction, but in civil society we do still expect you to rise above that.
Impossible you say? Well, you might reconsider that, as you look at this assault upon a statue of the Virgin Mary:
"A man was kneeling in prayer before the statue of the revered Madonna, with the photograph of a loved one in hand, in the small chapel of St. Barnabas in Perugia (Italy), when he was attacked by five “immigrants.”That was an actual case of deliberate, verbal and physical provocation (and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that was very likely committed by islamists - though militant atheists wouldn't be out of the question), which nevertheless was not 'responded' to with assault or murder, even though the person attempting to pray no doubt felt quite enough passion to do so in the heat of the actual moment.
The first thing they did was rip the photo from his hands.
Next they unleashed their hatred against the image of the Virgin Mary. They broke the statue to pieces and then urinated on it.
Don Scarda, pastor of St. Barnabas, said the event was led by five “foreigners.” By the time police arrived at the chapel, the unidentified attackers had already fled."
He, an obviously religious person, restrained himself. As he should have done.
Coldly cartoonish behavior
In the case of a cartoon of your prophet, or your mother, printed in a paper and at a distance in time and place, your immediate response may very well be to become incensed, even enraged over it, but as the cartoonist is not there pushing it in your face, knocking you down or urinating upon you, even though it may well be crude, insensitive and rude, they are not there, deliberately, physically, provoking you with it. And as moments, minutes, hours, days, months or even years pass, to say nothing of distance, the legitimacy of the 'heat of the moment' defense, as well as any appeal to it for understanding of any unreasonable violence, passes with it as well.
But when, at a cold remove in time and place, having made the decision to waive reason and stoke your passions, consuming the time and distance necessary to coldly plot, finance, schedule and execute an assault 'in response' to it, there is not only no heat of the moment there, there is no conceivable basis for calling it a 'response', rather than a conspiratorial plot. It is not something which any rational, civilized person, should ever have to concern themselves over 'expecting', and especially not for having expressed their opinion about something, be it prophets, mothers or anything else.
- 'It's normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.'
For while insulting the faith of others might be something which a person in a polite social context should not do, it is something which they have an absolute individual right to do, and the law exists to uphold and defend their legal right to express their opinion freely, without fear of physical reprisals. Indeed, attempting to limit a persons ability to criticize another's faith would not simply create a slippery slope, but a landslide rushing towards the elimination of freedom of expression and of liberty itself.
The Pope, more than anyone else, should realize that there can be no moral choice to do what is Right, without also having the liberty to choose as you see fit! There can be no morality without choice, and indeed there would and could be no Christianity without the choice to choose it. And even if you tried to enforce inoffensiveness, how would you regulate it? The islamist sees wearing a crucifix as an insult to islam - if you give any credence to this, you cannot discount his claim. If the Pope actually believed his own words, or gave a moment's thought to what they must mean, and so acted upon them, then he would have to accede to the islamists demands that he eliminate his clothing, eliminate his followers crucifixes, and indeed eliminate the Catholic Church and his position within it! He did say "you cannot provoke", right? Or did he not really mean anything by his words?
It may be normal to find offense in what you seek to find offense in, but to retaliate against the expression of ideas as if actually and physically provoked, with calculated violence, is no more sympathetic than cold blooded murder, and it should not be portrayed as if it were understandable or sympathetic or in anyway equivalent to an actual, in the heat of the moment, provocation. To portray what is,as what is not, is an attempt to erase what is real and true, which leaves you at that place the last several posts have been seeking to define, the limbo point where all progress is measured from, and which moving towards can be nothing other than regress.
When we equivocate between what a person, ideally, should not do, and what they cannot be allowed to do, we create an opening, an intellectual and spiritual vacuum, which threatens to suck all that is truly good and holy down with it. Where you retreat from your Right, Power will surge in and take control of that which your rights once held claim to. When we use words, or when we allow our leaders to use words, not for what they in reality mean, but for appeasing and rearranging our feelings about our shared reality, we lose that much more of our ability to control our lives without resorting to force, for Reason can gain no traction when the words it relies upon have been willfully separated from reality, and in that resulting landscape, only power will decide, or rather force, the issues.
And that gets to the Zero-Point of Power, where force prevails over reason, where desires dominate rights, you've arrived back at that point from which all civilized progress is measured by a culture's distance from it. And key to that is facing up to an uncomfortable fact: The Truth doesn't cause violence, but the rejection of it does. And whether you had the best of intentions, or not, makes no difference at all. Regressing towards that Zero-Point, no matter what level of progress you may once have realized, if you move in that direction, you are heading backwards and downwards, and if you are advocating for such movement, you are quite literally Pro-Regressive
When that Pro-Regressive impulse gains popular power, your ability to live in Reality is diminished, which makes it very easy for others to impose their will upon you. When you allow your good intentions to overrule your real perceptions, then you are not operating in, with, or in accordance with, Reality... and where do you suppose that will leave you - a happy place?!
For a people's good intentions to be compatible with wise action, it requires a strong commitment to the truth. American's weakness today is that we'd prefer our good intentions to be free of that itsy-bitsy requirement, and indeed given a good story, especially one which makes claims to helping others, and ourselves, well hey, if you can do that without-even-having-to-do-anything-yourself, we'll seemingly buy that for a vote.
Where do you suppose that will leave us?
When we retreat from the requirements of reality into what we wish it would be, when we allow our good intentions to override our real perceptions, then reality recedes to low tide, making it the simplest of things for those in power to impose their very real preferences for your life, upon you. Unjust Power depends upon our conceding what is Just, it depends upon our disconnection from reality, it relies upon your willingness to accept a virtual reality in place of the reality you would otherwise be aware of, if you were willing to acknowledge and inhabit it, that is. But when your intellectual links to the world around you, are rooted in a more preferable set of self flattering and useful lies, those lies become the means of manipulating your actual sense of reality, from within and from without, aiding and abetting your blindness to it, for without Truth you have no ability to bring logic to bear, your mind is left spinning its wheels without the traction to escape from the intentions of those with Power over you.
And when you willfully take a fall like that, unlike in a cartoon, you don't get to simply dust yourself off and move on to the next scene.
Beep-beep!
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