By David French
Thursday, May 07, 2015
Let’s be clear: The great freak-out over Pamela Geller’s
“draw Muhammad” contest isn’t about love for Islam or for robust and respectful
religious pluralism. Indeed, many of those expressing anguish over blasphemy
against Islam show no such concern over even the most vile attacks on the
Christian faith. Beyond that, they’re among the leaders in movements designed
to banish religious liberty — including Muslim religious liberty — to the
margins of American life.
Instead, the fury against Pamela Geller is motivated
mostly by fear — by the understanding that there are indeed many, many Muslims
who believe that blasphemy should be punished with death, and who put that
belief into practice. It’s motivated by the fear that our alliances with even
“friendly” Muslim states and “allied” Muslim militias are so fragile that
something so insignificant as a cartoon would drive them either to neutrality
or straight into the arms of ISIS.
That’s why even the military brass will do something so
unusual as call a fringe pastor of a tiny little church to beg him not to post
a YouTube video. That’s why the president of the United States — ostensibly the
most powerful man in the world — will personally appeal to that same pastor not
to burn a Koran. They know that hundreds of millions of Muslims are not
“moderate” by any reasonable definition of that word, and they will,in fact,
allow themselves to be provoked by even the most insignificant and small-scale
act of religious satire or defiance. After all, there are Muslim communities
that will gladly burn Christians alive to punish even rumored blasphemy.
Our nation’s “elite” knows of the 88 percent support in
Egypt for the death penalty for apostasy, and the 62 percent support in
Pakistan. They know of the majority support for it in Malaysia, Jordan, and the
Palestinian territories. They know that even when there’s not majority support
for the death penalty for exercising one of the most basic of human rights —
religious freedom — that large minorities still exercise considerable, and
often violent, influence on their nations.
The elite also knows this bloodthirstiness extends to
supporting terrorists. The following Pew Research Center numbers should sober
anyone who believes in the “few extremists” model of Muslim culture:
That’s a staggering level of support for a man who not
only targeted innocent men, women, and children in the West, but who allied
himself with the most medieval Muslim regime in the world: the Taliban. And,
ominously, his support waned only as his power waned. Islamists have a new
jihadist idol — ISIS.
Further, our elites also know that while ISIS’s brutality
certainly repels many Muslims, it attracts many others — that there are Muslim
young people who are so captivated by images of beheadings and burnings that
they’ll defy the law and their own nations to make their way to the jihadist
battlefronts of Iraq and Syria.
Unable or unwilling to formulate a strategy to
comprehensively defeat jihad or even to adequately defend our nation, our
elites adopt a strategy of cultural appeasement that only strengthens our
enemy. Millions in the Muslim world are drawn to the “strong horse” (to use
Osama bin Laden’s phrase), and when jihadists intimidate the West into silence
and conformity, the jihadists show themselves strong.
In a sane world, our national elites would not only rally
unequivocally around free speech, they would point to the events of Garland,
Texas, as perfectly symbolic of the way we handle threats against our
Constitution and our culture — by defeating our enemies and defending our
liberty. Instead, they express fears that provocative speech not only threatens
our troops abroad but our cities here at home.
Geller’s critics should spare us all the high-minded
rhetoric about tolerance and liberty and “democratic values.” In a
continent-sized nation of more than 300 million souls, “offensive” speech is
always happening. Geller’s speech is different not because it’s uniquely
insensitive or even uniquely “hateful.” Her speech is different because it
makes people afraid.
There is nothing inherently wrong with feeling fear —
especially when that fear is grounded in the reality of the enemy we face. Fear
is a natural human response to a savage and bloodthirsty enemy. But there’s
everything wrong with appeasement — especially when appeasement is concealed
behind a façade of self-righteousness.
Islam has a serious problem. Silencing Pamela Geller
isn’t the solution.
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