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/
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