Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Protected Victims vs. the Right to Desecrate

Piss Christ Flaming Mo

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?
- - - - - - - - - -
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.

Karl MarxThat’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.

7 comments:

I R A Darth Aggie said...

That's because Christians for the most part don't go around cutting the heads off people who they think insulted their religious beliefs.

Yorkshireminer said...

The dialectical imperative requires no less of us.

So now we need a dialectical imperative to start a fire. I don't think my Mum would have agreed with you there. Mind you I don't think she would have understood the posh words dialectical imperative, impartial necessitate would have been more in her line. She was certainly impartial when she found it necessary to start a fire in the grate. Both my Dad's “Daily Mirror” and my “Guardian” were sacrificed with a rare impartiality to keep us warm. It didn't matter if they had been read or not in the grate they went along with some sticks and the coal on top. In a fit of temerity I once asked God's messenger on earth why she had just burnt the newspaper I had just brought in the house, “because it was on the top of the Pile of Newspapers, if you didn't want me to burn it you would put it at the bottom of the pile” There is no answer to that sort of logic, I can still see my Dad chuckling away in his chair. Come to think of it I think my Mum was right if you want to burn anything be impartial. If you want to burn the Koran throw in a few knitting patterns or a Godzilla comic at the same time. The muslims would get the message and you would be free from prosecution. If they tried to prosecute you on that score they would have to prove that you also hated raglan sleeved cardigans and funny reptiles that didn't exist. By the way Baron lets just leave the Communist manifesto out of any burning, it is short, still a good read and explains historically why there was a need for a social revolution in the 1850s. Das Kapital that is something different, long turgid and incomprehensible, that certainly is a good companion to be burnt with the Koran, along with my favorite hate book Malleus Maleficarum by Kremmer and Sprenger. along with the Teletubby annual.

turn said...

NEW YAUKER NABBED FOR T'ROWING TESTAMENT IN TERLET
NEW YORK
(TP)_The United Methodist Church and other ecumenical groups have enjoined the police to prosecute a Brooklyn man for the hate crime of dunking the Bible--what many Christians believe is the Word of God revealed through the Prophets and Apostles--in a filthy public toilet.

The District Attorney's office, at first hesitant to prosecute, yielded to pressure after hundreds of offended Christians took to the streets in unruly protests. But it might have been the lawsuits threatened by church groups that convinced authorities to act.

The episode began when Pace University utilities worker Robert 'Butch' Bouchard was called on a routine clogged toilet in the library building.

"I just plunged it two or three times and I could see there was a book there. I looked closer and--God as my witness--I could see the gold letters on black leather", reports Mr. Bouchard. "I was shaken to my core and reported it to the university administration immediately".

See the rest at Redneck's Revenge headline "Closer than we thought".

KG said...

"...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."
If muslims in America and elsewhere keep up their campaign to stifle all criticism of their ideology, those words may become fact.
And I for one would prefer that they become fact rather than bow to them.

David M said...

Trackbacked by The Thunder Run - Web Reconnaissance for 08/02/2007
A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.

Zundfolge said...

One of the great ironies in all this is that the actions of CAIR are more likely to cause this mythical "backlash against Muslims" to materialize than even terrorism will.

The more CAIR speaks, the more CAIR sues (and the more I read the Qur'an) the less tolerant I am of Muslims in general in my personal life ... I certainly don't believe a word any Muslim says now.

No, I'm nowhere near violence or even discrimination against Muslims, but I certainly don't see them as victims of a handful of radicals who have hijacked their noble religion, which I once did.

Profitsbeard said...

Islam is more a political imperialism (-that stole the pages from the books of two previous religions in order to paper-over its juggernaut with a semblance of sanctity) than a true religion.

The "religion" is the mask for the moraline war machine.

A pity none of our leaders have bothered to study this existential ideological threat.

I'm sure something else seemed more important to them than the survival of our Civilization...