We should not bow to the Bullies of Islam
Andrew Bolt
Daily Telegraph
September 20 2012
Pg.13
The most frightening thing said about the Sydney riot against the Innocence Of Muslims video wasn't said by a Muslim, No, give the booby prize to Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.
His spokesman announced Conroy wanted Google to "review its terms of service'' to consider pulling the "clearly offensive" clip from YouTube. Hey, that is exactly what one of the world's top terrorist leaders wants as well.
The distribution of this entire film must be banned by the Americans — they slandered the
purity of his birth, slandered his faith and his morals," demanded Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Monday.
When our own Communications Minister and a terror chief in Lebanon speak as one about banning an obscure video to placate furious Muslims who haven't seen it we are already halfway to lost.
Even in America we see this same disgraceful scramble to placate mobs threatening to cut our throats at home or burning Western embassies abroad.
The Obama administration falsely blamed Innocence of the Muslims for triggering a deadly al-Qaeda assault on September 11 on the US consulate in Benghazi.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly denounced the ultra-low budget film, as if it was the cause of the lethal Muslim rage and not an excuse for it.
Meanwhile, brown-shirted US authorities raided the filmmaker's home after midnight to take him away for questioning over alleged breaches of this jailbird's probation.
Message received. Make a film attacking Islam and if you aren't hacked to death in the street like Dutch director Theo van Gogh,your own police could drag you out of your bed.
You'll kill us if we don't removethe film? OK, we'll try. We'll even rough up the filmmaker for you.You won't have to cut our throats,because we'll cut them for you.
What sort of message does Conroy think he's sending? May as well ask Nasrallah what else he wants banned.
Already Prime Minister Julia Gillard has dutifully echoed Nasrallah's contempt for a film I'm
almost certain she's also never seen calling Innocence Of Muslims "truly repulsive",
Repulsive? But that the film is (undoubtedly) bad and rude is no reason to wish it suppressed.
If we let jihadists stop us watching trash,we've let them decide for us what trash is.
Trouble is, for a Nasrallah,"trash" includes even prize-winning novels such as Sir Salman
Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and the illustrations of Danish cartoonists who mocked Islam and Islamic fanatics.
That book and those cartoons were also attacked with a murderous rage.
Rushdie was sentenced to death by Iran and in this latest orgy of outrage an Iranian religious foundation upped the reward for his killing to $3.5 million. One of his translators has been murdered, and two others wounded.
The Danish cartoonists have also been hunted byjihadists sent to kill them, and three Muslims were jailed over a bomb plot to punish Denmark for its impiety.
Sadly, such violence has worked. Rushdie was asked by the British government to write an apology to Muslims for his novel — and some leftist intellectuals attacked him for his rudeness.
Australian newspapers still refuse to show the Danish cartoons,and Yale University Press didn't dare publish them — even in Jytte Klausen's history The Cartoons That Shook The World.
How careful our publishers and artists have become in their efforts not to offend such extremists.
Scholastic Australia scrapped an adventure thriller, Army Of The Pure, after booksellers and l ibrarians said they would not stock a book with an Islamist terrorist as the "baddie", and the Melbourne Comedy Festival banned two acts that joked about Muslims.
Yes, that's the same festival that's staged Catherine Deveny's foul-mouthed tirade against
Christianity, God Is Bullshit. The only difference: Christians don't kill their critics.
Yet every such concession to threats and demands for censorship just invites more.
First, The Satanic Verses had to be outlawed. Then the Muhammad cartoons.
Now Innocence Of Musiims. Next — who knows, Dante's Inferno, the great
Renaissance masterpiece?
Quick, read it before the likes of Conroy decree even Dante's famous descriptions of the damned in hell are too dangerously offensive:
i saw one there so burst wide,From the chin severed down to
where we fart...Look at Mahommed and his mangled trunk!...
And all the other souls you witness here
Sowed scandaf, discord, schism when afive,
And therefore they are cioven as you see.
Yes, to hell with bigots who threaten us with death for saying
and reading as we please.
Give in once and we'll give in forever. Trash handed over today,
treasure tomorrow.
