The Mother of All Silence From the Fever Swamps

Well, it’s nice to be proven right — and by the Seattle MSM, no less: Molly Norris is 49 years old. Detective Baron Bodissey, Prussian Sleuth Extraordinaire, nailed it.

I’d like to say, “You heard it here first,” but you didn’t — this article in The Seattle Times was published last Saturday.

Why didn’t y’all tell me? It would have saved me a lot of work and allowed me to get a good night’s sleep last night.

Most of the article is full of the usual smarmy blather and bumf that you would expect from a high-toned Seattle newspaper columnist. But there’s more in there to interest us than the fact that Miz Molly really is as long in the tooth as I expected (although not anywhere near as decrepit as yours truly).

Here’s how the author, one Danny Westneat, described the situation:

The FBI had insisted a U.S. citizen renounce her identity, all because some radical in Yemen doesn’t like her art?

It turns out to be more complicated than that. The FBI says it never insisted Norris go underground. But it is true, her friends say, that an al-Qaida terror threat is driving a Seattleite to change her name and give up her art. It has happened without a peep of concern, either public or private, from Seattle’s political power structure.

So it’s as we suspected: Molly Norris has made things appear just a bit more extreme and alarming than they really are. I speculated on her motives in my previous post, so there is no need to cover that ground again here.

The back story is that last April, Norris, 49, drew a satirical cartoon calling for an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” She was protesting the TV network Comedy Central, which, under threat of violence from a Muslim group, had edited out references to the Islamic Prophet Muhammad from an episode of “South Park.”

Norris felt the network should stand up for free speech.

What happened next is that Norris lost control of her story to the fever swamps of the Internet.

“[T]he fever swamps of the Internet” —that’s us, folks!

We’re the whackjob racist boobs who live out here in flyover country and are always ready to go berserk and make life miserable for the effete urbanauts in places like Seattle.

But [Special Agent David] Gomez told The Seattle Times the FBI did not insist she vanish into a sort of witness-protection program.

“Whatever she did, it is what she decided to do,” Gomez said.

So the FBI gave her a lot of advice about how to protect herself, and left it at that. Her high-profile disappearance was her own decision. Presumably her protection plan was light on Smith and Wesson, but it was certainly heavy on headline space in the Seattle Weekly.

Pete Jackson, a local freelance writer, said he had lunch with Norris on Friday — two days after the Weekly story ran. It was his understanding the FBI’s advice consisted of things like varying walking routes and, “How to do the bomb walk around your car.”

[…]

Yet there’s been a “low-grade indifference” to Norris’ plight, Jackson says. Public officials haven’t contacted her, not even privately.

I’m not sure why anyone thinks such official attention would be de rigueur, but we’ll let that one pass.

“Here’s a case of a wanted terrorist demanding the head of a Northwesterner,” Jackson wrote on the Web site Crosscut. “Why, then, has Molly Norris been met by the mother of all silence?”

Now, wait a minute here.

Just a few exquisitely crafted paragraphs ago, the author told us that Ms. Norris “lost control of her story to the fever swamps of the Internet”. That is: the right-wing freakazoids went bonkers talking about her case. They loaded the web up with so much wordage that it made googling up the skinny on her that much more difficult for me late last night.

And then, when she “went into hiding”, they gave her even more screen pixels and RSS bytes.

She got her first fifteen minutes, and then ordered up another fifteen minutes — but she still wants more. Or at least her publicist friend Mr. Jackson does.

You know, it’s devilishly hard to craft a viable business plan for helping out Molly Norris. Her chosen methodology — sucking up to Muslims as much as possible — just isn’t going to work. It won’t make her problem go away, not ever.

Face it, Molly. You goofed. You dissed the prophet, and that can never, ever be taken back. Ask Theo Van Gogh — blasphemy is forever.

So you now have three choices:

1.		You can continue to hide and skulk and complain and apologize and beg, but a mujahid may cut your throat someday anyway.
2.		You can stand up proud and present a middle finger to the Islamic world, proclaiming a newly-discovered loyalty to the anti-jihad resistance. And, yes, a mujahid may still cut your throat someday.
3.		You can convert to Islam. It’s really easy: you just cover your head with a big black cloth and say, “La illaha ila Allah, wa Muhammadun rasul Allah.” After that you give up pork and alcohol and walking in public without a male family member accompanying you. You have to do whatever your husband or your father or your brother or other male relative tells you to do. But you will be able to stay alive — no one will cut your throat.

Those really are your only choices. I’d go for #2 if I were you, because it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Besides, if you join the resistance, there’s at least an outside chance that Islam will be pushed back far enough to make the fatwas against you relatively meaningless. It’s unlikely that this will happen within your lifetime, but it’s possible.

Or you might prefer #3. You’d be safe and taken care of. And I doubt they’d make you undergo FGM at your age.

It’s your call.


Nat tip: Nilk.