Tuesday, September 21, 2010

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.

13 comments:

Heisenbug said...

Under #3 someone might cut her throat for some random reason anyway. They call it "honour" killing...

Gotta love Islam. No matter which way you go, you're screwed.

månesteiner said...

One of the things which struck me in Danny Westneat's article was Seattle writer Pete Jackson's distress at the lack of public support Molly Norris received after she was placed on Anwar al-Awlaki's hit list:

"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 my by the mother of all silence?"

The Baron noted the enormous amount of non-silence coming from the anti-jihad folks on the internet. Still, Jackson is bemoaning the "low-grade" indifference" from the public officials in Seattle.

Pete Jackson's bafflement at Seattle's silence in response to Anwar al-Awlaki's threat against Molly Norris just made me shake my head. Seattle's non-reaction shouldn't come as a surprise at all. It's the inevitable result of the endless insistence, in the face of blatant and overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Islam is nothing for the West to worry about. It has no malicious intentions towards us. Just get on with your lives and don't criticize Muslim behavior. Not any of it.

Yes, they occasionally like to behead journalists, impale death threats into the chest of murdered filmmakers, burn cars in the streets of Paris, burn US flags, shout "Death to America" on a near weekly basis and methodically attempt to impose Sharia law everywhere they live.

Yet we're instructed not to get too alarmed about this. We're indoctrinated not to have a response to the violence and the threats from Islam. It's a religion of peace after all, just like Christianity and Judaism. If we just treat Islam with respect and deference you'll see that things will work out just fine.

So, Seattle's official response to Molly Norris' death threat from Anwar al-Awlaki was rather muted? Well, that's just the multicultural, non-Islamophobic reaction they were told to have. A passive indifference to the behavior of the followers of the Prophet - That's what you wanted wasn't it?

Juniper in the Desert said...

Art? She's doing the world a favour, giving up that garbage!

Tell her to get a real job: in a supermarket!

Dex Quire said...

Baron,

Here's another link from the more or less inbred Seattle journalist community, along with the same whimpering valedictorian style, along with the same blame the right wing interneters.

joe six-pack said...

The war draws closer. It can only be a matter of time. How long is anyone's guess.

WAKE UP said...

Okay, enough already. No matter how feckless (or calculating) Molly is/was, the bottom line is that ISLAM is the problem, not Molly. Time to suit up, people.

månesteiner said...

Sorry for the typo in my earlier comment:

"been my by the mother of all silence?" should have been:
"been met by the mother of all silence?"

Joe Copeland's article Dex Quire linked to has this headline:

"Cartoonist drops her work over Fatwa threat"

I think the headline is pretty accurate. But this closing quote in Copeland's article gets it completely wrong:

"For now, though, it is a day to mourn the ability of a fanatic to steal Norris' rights as a person and the rights of her readers to see her work. And to wish Norris, out there somewhere, all the best."

Anwar al-Awlaki didn't steal Molly Norris' rights. From way across the seas, in the 3rd world country of Yemen, he challenged them. And Molly Norris, and a boat load of other people, many of whom are employed at high levels in the US government, and entrusted with the responsibility of protecting a US citizens rights, quietly and shamefully stepped back from that challenge.

I too wish Molly Norris all the best.

Profitsbeard said...

Molly's a fool, but she's our fool.

And, whether accidentallly or not, she did the right thing [mildly] mocking the mass-murdering pedophile warlord.

And the rightness of her act, not her own cowardice toward it, needs to be defended.

And she gets carried along in that overall defense, whether she appreciates it or not.

No totalitarian theocratic crackheads get to threaten our people.

Even if they aren't too bright or too brave.

We'll even defend feckless fools from Mohammedan maniacs.

Laurel said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
WAKE UP said...

I repeat: ISLAM is the problem, not Molly.

Dymphna said...

One of our readers who can't comment personally, sent me his observations about Miz Molly and what he sees in his town:

Molly Norris puts me in mind of a friend of mine who is a liberal gay guy. He lives in a part of town that is increasingly Islamized.

Whenever we discuss islam and related matters he uses the old clichés: you know, how my observations are "Islamophobic". And that tired old line about Islam not being a monolith, that only a small minority are Wahhabists

In fact, those creepy creationists are just as dangerous as any terrorist, and by the way, have you read Karen Armstrong's wonderful book?...

This friend visited Iran recently and told me with a straight face how very protective the Islamic government is of its Jewish minority.

It's tempting to let him learn the hard way, but that will be no satisfaction.

Is there any way to help him see the reality?


Good question. Some of our commenters can't seem to grasp the reality of what we write, so I don't have any solutions.

Dymphna said...

Lygeia, I deleted your comment because it exhibited a careless reading of the post.

In addition, your accusation is rude, bordering on slander.

If you can point precisely to the sentence in which we gave any information about this woman that you couldn't google yourself, then I'll reinstate your remarks.

You don't appear to understand the point of the post; thus your accusation is without merit.

In the final analysis people can't be reasoned out of opinions which they didn't use their Reason to devise.

Find another page, please.

GM Roper said...

Dymphna, Baron, since I posted on my wee little blog a drawing of Mohammad on "Everybody draw Mohammad Day" I think I'll choose number two and post it on my blog. Imagine, a finely worded finger at all of them, al-Awlaki included.

Great Idea.