September 28, 2006

This is How it Begins - The West Shows Islam it Insists on Having Freedom of Speech

So it begins. Western pop culture knows exactly what to do with people who can't take a joke. We annihilate their mistaken beliefs with comedy. South Park led the way with its episode earlier this year, daring Comedy Central to air a cartoon of Mohammed. Jay Leno again showed the way last week, when he let us see that it was okay to make fun of radical Islam, with this joke:

Iraq has demanded that Pope Benedict issue an apology for statements he made linking Islam to violence. Well, where did the Pope get that crazy idea, huh? I'm stunned! Well, maybe the apologies will stop the church burnings, and the "Death to the Pope" chants.

And with this billboard (which had to have been network-approved), Comedy Central is saying to Matt and Trey, the creators of South Park, that they'll tolerate jokes about Muslims alongside jokes about everybody else. Once this starts in our pop culture, it will snowball and become unstoppable. Our pop culture entertainers have become expert in this kind of thing over the past several decades of going after every so-called sacred cow that anyone could identify.

Islam won't know what hit it. Reform-minded Muslims will have their eyes opened, and will have ammunition provided to them, in their efforts to bring Islam out of the 7th century, and into the 21st.

This is how we defend our freedom of speech. We don't let anyone tell us what we can and can't say - what we can and can't make a joke about - or what we can and can't publish. If someone doesn't want us to make a joke about something, we make all the jokes about it. And it starts just like this, with little digs.

And sure, in response it may be that from time to time the Islamists will demonstrate their stupidity by rioting, burning their own buildings, killing each other - and maybe even getting a few of us, like the nun who lost her life to radical Islamists earlier this month. But you know what? This is a war, and since the enemy can't fight our armies directly, it's one that in many ways is fought in the media. The radical Islamists are already doing everything they can to kill Westerners. They're going to find something to riot about even if it's a goofy story about flushing a book down toilet. (Consider, as Thomas Sowell put it this week, "the physical absurdity of trying to flush the Koran -- or any other book -- down a toilet.") And they're going to try to do that whether we tell them what boneheads they are or not.

It's up to our government to fight this war, that the radical Islamists have declared on us, militarily and politically, until we win it. And in the meantime, it's up to our media, and to all of us, to keep defending our freedom of speech, by using it.

These Islamists wanted a media war, with their assassinations staged in front of MSM photographers. Now they're going to see what media war really looks like.

Radical Islamists: get ready to laugh, you morons.