Protected Victims vs. the Right to Desecrate

Concerning the performance art of young Stanislav Shmulevich at Pace University, Robert Spencer says it the best:

For all the examples of the double standard that [Christopher Hitchens], Malkin and others have brought forth — from Piss Christ to Chris Ofili’s Turner-Prize-winning, elephant-dung and pornography-bedecked Virgin Mary and the rest — emphasize the fact that the real agenda of today’s dominant politically correct culture is certainly not tolerance, or even anything-goes moral relativism. Some things most emphatically don’t go, as Stanislav Shmulevich’s two felony charges indicate. As a cultural movement, political correctness and multiculturalism are emphatically anti-Western and anti-Christian. And they are also suicidal.

But it is not going to stop. As mad as the felony charges against him are, Stanislav Shmulevich most likely is not the end of anything, but rather the beginning. We are unlikely as a society to become a place in which disrespect or even hatred of Christianity comes to be regarded as just as dangerous to the social order as disrespect or hatred of Islam, and we are just as unlikely to return to a saner time when one could not be prosecuted for disliking someone else’s beliefs (in which case Shmulevich would have to pay for the books, and for any necessary plumbing work, but that would be all). We have become a society of sacrosanct protected classes whose victim status places them above all criticism. Those individuals and groups who do not enjoy victim status can be shredded with impunity in the public square, and the shredders are hailed as “courageous,” “iconoclastic,” and “irreverent.” But if the protected group is criticized in any way, we are told that the criticism creates a climate of “hostility” and “hate” that can culminate in yet more victimization.

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has worked assiduously for years to claim this protected victim status for Muslims, and its reaction to this incident has allowed them to articulate how they want Muslims in America to be regarded. CAIR-NY Civil Rights Coordinator Aliya Latif said: “We must all be concerned when any actions cross the line from protected free speech to acts designed to intimidate. Just as there is a difference between someone burning a cross in their own backyard and burning that same cross in the yard of an African-American family, there is a difference between desecrating a religious text in a private setting and doing so in a setting that will create a hostile learning environment.” Muslims are the new blacks, and CAIR is the new NAACP; this statement is of a piece with CAIR’s annual hate crimes report, which attempts, often in quite imaginative ways, to project an image of Muslims as bravely going about their daily lives in an American society that is inveterately hostile, racist, and on the verge of breaking out into open violence against them.

Yet this is nothing more than a myth. A potent one, to be sure, but a myth. Muslims are not being lynched, or persecuted, or discriminated against in America. Time and time again breathless media-amplified fears of “backlash” against Muslims prove unfounded, and Muslims continue to practice their faith here with more freedom than they enjoy in most of the countries from which they came.

Compare the “Piss Christ” with the Flaming Mo #2 video that we featured here earlier today. Both deserve equal protection under the principle of free speech, right?
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Insult Christ and Christians: that’s protected.

Insult Mohammed and Mohammedans: that’s… well… umm… That’s not quite the same, you see. There are limits to free speech, after all, and we must respect other cultures etc blah yak.

Yup. Equal protection, my tushie.

Here’s the rub: the Bible and the Koran aren’t even analogous to one another. The Koran is a political document.

That’s right: it’s not holy scripture or a religious book. It’s an instruction manual on how to establish and maintain through brutality and slaughter a totalitarian political regime that masquerades as a religion.

It’s not a spiritual treatise.

The functional equivalent to the burning of the Koran would be to torch The Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf.

Let’s get our analogies straight, and not make any categorical errors. The dialectical imperative requires no less of us.