Published on July 23, 2016URL of the original posting site: http://clashdaily.com/2016/07/boom-meme-perfectly-illustrates-stop-terrorist-attack/
Political Cartoons » Wheel of Misfortune
Posted on May 7, 2015 by I’ve always admired people who stick up for their principles even under threat of violence or death. Thomas More, the “Man for All Seasons,” is a hero of mine.
After this week, I’ve got a couple of other heroes on my list. There’s Pamela Geller, who now has a fatwah, a death threat, on her head because she stood up for free speech against the world’s Islamo-fascists. And there’s Bosch Fawstin, the cartoonist who won both the judges prize and the People’s Choice prize at last weekend’s contest in Garland, Texas.
Fawstin is also under threat of death by the backward forces of Islam, simply for drawing an image of Mohammed. It’s interesting that in all the talk about the failed terrorist attack in Garland, few if any news outlets have actually runFawstin’s winning illustration. It’s pretty nifty line art, and I especially like theHitlerian mustache.The image shows Mohammed threatening the artist, saying, “You can’t draw me!” and the artist responding, “That’s why I draw you.”
It’s clever, and I don’t think there’s anything offensive about it, unless you’re a Muslim who’s embarrassed to have his Prophet’s and fellow Muslims’ attitudes summed up in a sentence.
Many of the entries were offensive on various levels, from the naughty-but-funny to the truly cringe-inducing, but I don’t think any of them were necessarily inaccurate. Speaking as a fellow entrant, I think Fawstin’s piece was the right choice. (Mine was more a study for a painting, rather than a cartoon, but I thought it was important to represent for the First Amendment. I would post a link to all the contest entries, but the page seems to have been removed from Photobucket.)
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart, Fawstin explained that he was raised as a Muslim in the Bronx but left the religion. When 9/11 occurred, he researched his former faith extensively and decided that he had to use his artistic talents to stand up against jihad. From the Breitbart interview:
“I did receive some flack for leaving Islam, but I didn’t feel like I left anything important behind. I wanted to get the hell out. Islam had no hold on me whatsoever. It wasn’t a heartbreak, I just left.
“Right after I left Islam, 9/11 happened. I revisited everything. I reread the Koran. I read countless books on jihad, Islam, and Muhammad. I knew as a cartoonist, as an artist, I had a tool to respond to the atrocities. I made sure I knew Islam very well before making any move.
“I became a follower of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and remain so to this day. Ironically, I went from the most misogynistic philosophy on earth, to that created by a woman. Without her work, I don’t know where the hell I’d be today.”
Fawstin’s discussion about growing up in a Muslim household underscores some of the things we’ve discussed about Islam here at Godfather Politics, including the sympathy for Nazism and the Left’s myth of the “moderate Muslim.”
“Almost all of the women in my generation were beaten by their husbands. There was strong admiration for Hitler in the household, because he killed more Jews than anyone. That’s why I refer to Hitler as Islam’s favorite infidel. They forgive him because he killed more Jews than anyone. we were ‘moderate Muslims,’ but there was still hardcore misogyny and Jew-hatred in my community.”
As might be expected from that champion of liberals-only speech, Facebook, Fawstin’s Facebook page has been removed, and Fawstin has been requesting that people share his winning cartoon with friends and associates.
The Left is abominable when it comes to protecting the free speech rights of anyone who is not in their PC club. Not only that, but Homeland Security has not even bothered contacting Geller about the Islamic death threat made against her on social media. (For that matter, I don’t think the threat has been taken down as of yet.)
But the Left — and I’m including here the RINO crowd and “moderate” Right — doesn’t get it. If we conservatives lose free speech to Islamic terror, it undercuts all our rights.
While the Left may be fine with that, the rest of us who know the cost must stand up with Geller and Fawstin for free speech against the forces of jihad and totalitarianism.
Bryan Fischer, Posted: Thursday, May 7, 2015Let me stipulate up front that drawing caricatures of Muhammad as a form of social commentary is not my style. It’s not something I would do. And it’s not something the American Family Association would be a part of.
That being said, the reaction to Pamela Geller’s “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas is worrisome and is lurching the U.S. in the direction of becoming an abject, fearful Shariah-compliant nation rather than a proud, bold Christian one. The issue is simple. Regardless of whether we would enter a contest like the one Ms. Geller sponsored, or even approve of it, the question is this: should somebody be murdered in cold blood for publishing a political cartoon?
The First Amendment prohibits the federal government and all of its branches from interfering with “the freedom of speech.” By this plank, the Founders intended to protect robust political speech. 
We as a nation had just emerged from an era in which the Crown sought to suppress and punish any political commentary it didn’t like, and the Founders made a point of ensuring that kind of oppression would not be acceptable in America.
(By the way, the Founders were protecting political speech. They were not protecting pornography, obscenity, vulgarity or even profanity. They would be scandalized at the way in which the First Amendment has been perverted to protect things that would have horrified them.)
The Texas state constitution is equally clear: Every person shall be at liberty to speak, write or publish his opinions on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that privilege; and no law shall ever be passed curtailing the liberty of speech or of the press.
This means that, in America, we must all be prepared to listen to political speech that agitates us and offends us. Trust me, this happens to conservatives every day when we read the New York Times and other members of the low-information media.
Constitutional provisions regarding free speech mean public debate over the nature of Islam is fully protected. The government must protect freedom of robust political debate, and is prohibited from restricting it in any way. The merits of Islam, the truth about Islam, the truth about Muhammad, the question of Muslim immigration, etc. are all proper topics for public discussion. Such debate includes, as it has since the dawn of the Republic, political cartoons, which were often used to make salient points on a matter of public concern. 
Many voices, on both the left and the right, have condemned Pamela Geller in this circumstance rather than the Muslim shooters. She has been blamed for getting shot at by figures on the right such as Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly. She has been faulted for going ahead with her event knowing it could possibly trigger Islamic violence.
Such critics do not realize, by the way, what they are saying about the religion of Islam. The mere fact they argue Ms. Geller should have known better means they know that Islam is not in fact a religion of peace no matter how hard they try to convince themselves (and us) otherwise. 
As James Taranto observed in the Wall Street Journal, “In the case at hand, it would effectively make Shariah’s prohibition on images of Muhammad the law of the land. The terrorists really would have won.”
That’s not the America the Founders bequeathed to us. And it’s not the America we should accept today.
By Rich Lowry — May 5, 2015URL of the Original Posting Site: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417903/americans-have-right-insult-islam-rich-lowry
Terrorists assaulted a “Mohammed cartoon” event in Texas sponsored by activist Pamela Geller, and the response has been, in part, soul-searching over what’s wrong with Pamela Geller.
Geller is an attention-hungry provocateur who will never be mistaken for Bernard Lewis, the venerable scholar of Islam. Her Texas gathering to award a cash prize for the best cartoon of Mohammed — depictions of whom are considered offensive by many Muslims — was deliberately offensive, but so what?
Two armed Muslim men showed up intending to kill the participants, and were only thwarted when they were shot dead by a police officer who was part of the elaborate security arrangements.
Absent the security, we might have had a Charlie Hebdo–style massacre on these shores, in Garland, Texas, no less, a suburb of Dallas. (The world would be a safer and better place if the forces of civilization everywhere were as well-prepared and well-armed as they are in Texas.)
RELATED: Islam and Free Speech: Missing the Point in Garland
That horrifying prospect didn’t stop CNN from interrogating Geller the morning after the attack about her views of Islam and her decision to have as the keynote speaker for her event the anti-Islam Dutch politician Geert Wilders (who has to live under 24-hour protection). The implicit assumption was that Geller and her cohorts were as much of a problem as the fanatics who planned to censor them at the barrel of a gun.
Today, criticism of Islam is at the vanguard of the fight for free speech, since it is susceptible to attack and intimidation by jihadists and calls for self-censorship by the politically correct.
Geller refers to her meeting as a free-speech event while her critics prefer to call it an anti-Islam event. They are really one and the same. In today’s circumstances, criticism of Islam is at the vanguard of the fight for free speech, since it is susceptible to attack and intimidation by jihadists and calls for self-censorship by the politically correct.
“Yes, but . . . ” defenses of Geller don’t cut it. She had a perfect right to do what she did, and it’s a condemnation of her enemies — and confirmation of her basic point about radical Islam — that the act of drawing and talking elicited a violent response.
If cartoons of Mohammed may seem a low, petty form of speech, they are only the fault line in a deeper clash of civilizations. A swath of the Muslim world doesn’t just want to ban depictions of Mohammed, but any speech critical of Islam.
RELATED: Fight Speech with Speech, Guns with Guns
There was much tsk-tsking after the Charlie Hebdo attack about how France had made itself vulnerable to domestic terrorism because it has failed to assimilate Muslim immigrants. The critique carried a whiff of self-congratulation about how much better the U.S. is as a melting pot, and so it is.
Yet two Phoenix roommates were still prepared to commit mass murder to keep people from drawing images they don’t like. One of them, an American convert to Islam named Elton Simpson, had been convicted of lying to the FBI about discussions about traveling to Somalia, allegedly to engage in terrorism. He evidently took inspiration from ISIS calls to attack the Garland, Texas, event, in another sign that the poisonous ideology of radical Islam knows no borders.
It will ever be thus until all of Islam accepts the premises of a free society, as have other major world religions. The day there can be the Muslim equivalent of the play The Book of Mormon without the writers, actors, and audience members fearing for their lives will be the day that Islam is reformed. Then, and only then, will mockery of Islam by the likes of Pamela Geller and her ilk be a tasteless irrelevance, rather a statement from atop the ramparts of free speech.
Yes, there is such a thing as self-restraint and consideration of the sensibilities of others, but it shouldn’t be the self-restraint of fear. Pamela Geller is a bomb-thrower, but only a metaphorical, not a literal, one. That’s the difference between her and her enemies — and between civilization and barbarism.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com . © 2015 King Features Syndicate
Below are a few of the less offensive cartoons submitted.
URL of the Original Posting Site: http://conservativebyte.com/2015/05/dont-mess-with-garland/
We respect the will of the people as long as they are our people,
URL of the Original Posting Site: http://freedomoutpost.com/2015/05/comedian-on-garland-texas-shooting-my-favorite-drawings-were-the-two-chalk-lines-out-front/#Typ3aOSzvfZOyWqp.99
Just hours after the Islamic terrorist attack in Garland, Texas, left two men dead, a conservative comedian absolutely nailed it with this joke on Twitter:
But critics were quick to jump on Evan Sayet, calling him insensitive and sparking a huge debate on his Twitter feed.
We caught up with Sayet via email after his tweet went viral to ask about PC culture and media coverage of the shooting.
“Political Correctness — which is just a euphemism for the totalitarian concept of ‘Newspeak’ written about by Orwell in 1984 – has nearly destroyed comedy in the same way that it has nearly destroyed education, journalism and the other fields where the powers-that-be are on the Left,” Sayet told TheDCNF. “Now, just as the ‘education’ system is used to indoctrinate children and ‘journalism’ is used to give credence to Leftist policies and positions, comedy (and the whole of the entertainment industry) is used to reinforce Leftist propaganda.”
The Los Angeles comedian said the critics are the elite left, not every day Americans.
“The response, in fact, has not only been overwhelming but overwhelmingly positive,” Sayet told TheDCNF. “The vast majority of Americans — especially those outside the Leftists’ bastions of academia, journalism, entertainment and Democratic Party politics — are wholly in support of my statement whereby hundreds of innocents being saved by the killing of two terrorists is a GOOD thing.”
Sayet said he does not regret the tweet in the slightest.
“I only regret we live in a society where a joke at the expense of would-be mass murderers is something that anyone thinks I have to defend. And, again, the Leftists have accomplished their goal,” Sayet told TheDCNF. “Who is really irreverent here, me in a silly tweet about would-be mass murderers or those who sought to assault that which SHOULD be revered, the First Amendment right — the HUMAN right — of free speech?”
Home / 2012 Election /
Benghazi.
It’s all over Fox News, Twitter and Facebook but most of the MSM is quiet about it. This close to an election, with a massive storm that has all but demolished the East Coast, is it still worth mentioning? And, as a mother with two little ones who could one day join the military, I have to ask myself: if anyone of those four men were my child, how would I want this handled?
Regarding Trayvon Martin, President Obama once famously said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.” And as I look at the pictures of the men who died at the consulate in Benghazi, part of me can’t help but think, “That could have been my husband. That could one day be my son (or my daughter).”
So as a military veteran, as a military wife, and as a mother: yes, Benghazi still matters. It matters because it shows that while Joe Biden — and the rest of this administration — may claim that al Qaeda is dead because Osama Bin Laden is dead, they are naïve (to put it politely) and dead wrong (to put it bluntly). It matters because as more and more reports come out, by all accounts, our president left four Americans to die so he could get a good night’s sleep and campaign the next day.
Because the TV reports show the attack happening at night, it’s easy for most Americans to forget the time conversion and think it was night in DC as well. The attack started at approximately 9:40 PM the night of September 11th, making it approximately 3:40 PM in Washington, DC. The White House was informed of the attack within two hours of the start — or approximately the time President Obama was returning to the White House from Walter Reed and meeting with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. As of 5:16 PM, however, Libyan officials had already informed the AP that the Libyan consulate had been breached. Either way, the president would have been notified immediately. By 7:41 PM, the stunning news came that at least one American was dead.
During the initial stages of the attack, two former SEALs heard the call for help at their compound a mile from the attack. They were told to stand down — which makes sense. If you have CIA assets who are former SEALs, they’re high value assets. You wouldn’t deploy them unless you absolutely needed to or were sure that they wouldn’t be wasted. Fair enough, except this presupposes a couple of conclusions: first, that the ambassador and his remaining staff, along with any sensitive material, couldn’t be extracted safely, and secondly, that any additional assets would die along with the ambassador. In other words, when the order to stand down came, at some level, the United States government had already written Ambassador Stevens and the staff off for lost. Particularly damning is the news that someone was lasing a target, which means there had to be a gunship on-station that could sync up or that it was a last ditch effort in the hopes that help was on the way and they would see the targets as they were inbound.
So someone had decided that the US ambassador and his staff weren’t worth saving. But why write off an ambassador that quickly? Even with the time-line crunch, even absent rules of engagement and special instructions for pilots operating in the theater, why not treat this as a point defense engagement instead of an urban close air support request? This way, American forces might could quickly have been deployed, terrorists scattered with a few bursts from an AC-130 and American property respected.
And, even if it was the insistence of SECDEF that it be treated as urban CAS, then SPINs and ROEs from the previous Libya engagement could have been utilized, or AFRICOM could have tasked a couple of their pilots and a JAG officer or two to gin some up quick enough to save lives. Even if a few terrorists were maimed/killed/otherwise inconvenienced in the attack and American lives saved, this would have only been good press for President Obama at home. He could tout how strong he was on terrorism, how he made the decision to protect American lives, and how this behavior would not be tolerated — in short, we would see the post-bin Laden football spiking all over again.
Instead, there was confusion. There was a video, there wasn’t a video, it was a terror attack but not really, there was the arrest of a guy who had violated his parole and incidentally posted a video on YouTube for saying mean things about Islam, there was a speech in the Rose Garden, and then there was a campaign trip off to Las Vegas. And in the midst of it all, when the dust settled, there were four dead Americans that didn’t have to die.
It’s worth repeating: Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods didn’t have to die. Someone made the decision that they weren’t worth saving. Someone, for whatever reason, decided that it was more worth it to take a public relations hit for four dead Americans than risk saving them or (and here’s the tin foil hat part) risk having whatever Ambassador Stevens knew come out in public.
Someone broke faith with Americans that, when trouble happened, American forces would be there to protect them. And that’s why Benghazi matters—not just for this election, but for America, because the next time this happens, it could be my husband, your son, or any other American serving in harm’s way. Don’t let these men have died in vain.
I am having a hard time understanding any person who cannot admit, “I am wrong.” Evidently, Fonzie is not the only one who cannot articulate those humbling words. Part of the human experience is learning from our mistakes, failures and ineptness. No one can expect to grow as a human being without acknowledging that what they did, how they did it and the thought processes that produced the action where wrong. You end up with that old proverb, “Doing the same thing over and over without getting the desired results is insanity.”
President Obama stepped in it when during the debate making a big deal about when he admitted it was terrorism that struck the Benghazi, Libya embassy this last September 11. The only explanation any honest observer could give in his remark to check the manuscript is that he was hoping enough people would see his perspective about his last comments saying that no act of terror would go unanswered. And yes, there have been a few, like Katie Couric. For the rest of us “non Kool-Aid drinking” Americans saw the obvious the first time, especially after two weeks of dodging the question, and send out his propaganda chorus to say it was a spontaneous attack from a demonstration fueled by an internet video.
Is it a psychological problem when people can’t simple say, I was wrong”? Is it a vanity thing to not owned up to the truth? Is it failing of an individual’s character, or value system, that prevents them from humbling themselves like regular humans and just say, “I did that wrong”? I know I am not smart enough to speculate about the answer.
Something else I heard during the debate and have heard others say something similar. It has been obvious to several observers that President Obama has conducted the Office of the President under a set of Collectivist/Socialist theories. Although these theories have proven failures for over 200 years, still there are those that think they can get it right. They are not evil people (I believe that President Obama has been demonized which is wrong to do. No one deserves that).
President Obama several times, “I feel that….”, “I believe that……” as well as other like phrasing. That indicates to me a man with well-meaning motivations TRYING philosophies that are counter to the Founders of our country, and the Representative Republic they designed for us. I do not know the man’s heart, and unlike God, I cannot see his spirit or know his intentions. I know God has commanded that we do not judge one another. Unfortunately, those of us on the Right have stooped to that level, and we have been, and are, wrong. I have repented, and I hope we all do the same.
According to all the reports I have heard today many people who supported President Obama in 2008 have already switched their support. You know that has become serious when the New York Times prints articles pointing out your flaws, thinking, and conduct. Even one of the most liberal of all Senators, Diane Feinstein has come out criticizing the President and the Whitehouse.
If in fact that is the case and President Obama has tried to perfect the philosophies, ideologies and theories of Collectivism/Socialism, than that helps me understand why he is so reluctant to own up to being wrong. I know that I will continue to pray for President Obama as I have for all Presidents I have lived under. I pray you are all doing the same.
