Day 122. NEWS!!!
Looking at the stats for the blog, you must have learned enough about life and love and pain the first 100 days. I was sort of repeating myself sometimes... and BIG titles get bigger views, so I'm gonna switch up and talk about..... current events. Which doesn't always mean politics, so quit your eye-rolling. News around the globe affects us more than most people realize, so we should talk about it sometimes. Not just when I get pissed off about something in the US, things around the world.
Today's subject: let's dive into the massacre of a dozen French artists/writers by radial Islamic extremists. I don't have a problem calling them what they are. A few articles I read even hinted that the overwhelming lack of media calling out radical Islam likely promulgates it. I can't say I disagree completely: when you kowtow to evil instead of confronting it, the precedent is set and evil grows stronger.
First, mention of an article by the brilliant Charles Krauthammer from a decade ago, where he was pre-cognizant and knew where France was headed. It's behind a paywall at Time.com, but here's a bit of it:
The gendarmes have weapons. The kids they face in the street have mostly stones and Molotov cocktails. It is a mismatch. But it's the cops who are the heavy underdogs--the cops and the France that the cops alone represent in those burning godforsaken ghettos where most Frenchmen dare not go.
On the one side are the protester-arsonists, many if not most of them Muslim, whom the Interior Minister called racaille (rabble)--young, restless, violent, vibrant, angry, jobless, envious and fecund. And on the other side is an aged and exhausted civilization, the hollowed-out core of European Christendom, static, aging, contented, coddled, passive...and literally without faith. Who would you think will win in the end?
If you needed a snapshot of the balance of forces in this civilizational struggle taking place in France, consider only the incomprehension and inertness of the official French response. The President didn't say a word for 10 days. The state of emergency wasn't declared until Day 13. Meanwhile, the Interior Minister and Prime Minister offered dueling slogans and empty promises, with an eye more on their upcoming presidential contest than on the fire this time.
But the prospects for success in France are far fewer, because even if France changed, woke up and welcomed those it had once invited, it is very late. The grandparents who first came would have eagerly accepted the invitation. But their young have grown up in an alienated monoculture that has contempt for the godless decadence of French secularism with its empty churches, sexual license and existential ennui. France doesn't want them. They don't want the France they are throwing rocks at. But they are not leaving. And they are growing.
France always thought it had one last resort, one ready strategy for fending off the rage of its Arab street: beyond avoidance lay appeasement. No country in the West has done more to cultivate world Arab opinion, to appease Arab terrorists, to ostentatiously oppose American Middle East policy (Iraq above all), to champion the signal Arab cause of Palestine. It was no accident that Yasser Arafat chose Paris as his place to die--Paris, after Jerusalem, his second holiest city.
Paris burns anyway. As the French seem to learn every 70 years, appeasement does not work. It merely whets the appetite. And the angry alien young were already hungry."
The cartoonists at Charlie Hedbo appeased no one. They weren't bigots, or racists, or homophobes, or sexists: they mocked everyone. From the Pope to Jewish merchants to world leaders. We in the United States scream "First Amendment! First Amendment!" and with good reason: our right to civil discourse is granted by a Constitutional Amendment. Even when someone I don't like is spewing what I'd consider hatred (think Westboro Baptist Church,) I'd still fight for their right to speak their evil words. Other nations don't have the same protections, but the people of Paris took to the streets Tuesday night to show their support for free speech. "Je suis Charlie", French for "I am Charlie" became their war cry.
The failure of major media outlets to publish the very documents those twelve people were killed for shows the sad state of journalism. I'm just some chick on the internet who writes random crap, but even I know that you don't bow down to bullies. Yes, sometimes the bullies win. But not because you backed down. The Associated Press should be especially shamed: they released a statement that said they would not publish the controversial cartoons as "it's been our policy for years that we refrain from moving deliberately provocative images," yet the obviously inflammatory "Piss Christ" photograph remained on their website from its contentious release in 1987 until yesterday. CNN continues to make the image available on their weblinks.
A multitude of "right-wing talking heads" as the national media refers to them spoke out against the media's lack of coverage, along with their half-truths and their duplicity. The omission of the cartoons drawn by the dozen artists in Paris speaks volumes: as Mark Steyn put it, "if more of us really were like Charlie, the Hebdo staff probably wouldn’t be dead. They assumed the entirety of the risk in defying Islamic taboos because their bigger, stronger, better funded brothers and sisters in western media declined to share it by publishing the images themselves." These brave artists went to work Tuesday morning just like any other day, and their cold shadows should loom large to those who are or would be silenced.
Those who would lump all Muslims into the same category take heed: the billion that do not perform jihad, that do not subjugate women, that wish only to worship their God (who is the same as our God, by the way) in peace, they are equally abhorrent of these acts. Anjem Choudary, a radical Islamic cleric in the UK, does NOT speak for them. Yes, even the nutter Bill Maher gets it: radial Islamists want to kill anyone who does not convert to their perverted arm of Islam. Millions of Muslims live as free citizens around the world, in Western nations, adopting Western dress and speech, and yes, even some of our bad habits. Their assimilation should be an example to radicals, who chose to live in the 14th century instead of the 21st.
While there are many who believe they have been commanded to "kill all the infidels," we outnumber them. The worldwide conversation that is not taking place is costing lives every day. Don't get me started on Boko Haram, Nigeria, Coptic Christians in the Middle East. The radicals must, and I believe will, be stopped. At what expense, I can't fathom. There aren't enough leaders willing to step into the fray militarily or more importantly politically, and stand up for freedom. Not just ours, but for everyone. Religion does not matter, God granted us all free will. Radical Islam will, and does, take that away from anyone willing to cower before them.
Lesson One Hundred Twenty Two: Enough with the rhetoric. Gather the faithful, sound the horns. It only takes two to start a movement. We have billions.
608 to go,,,
