Fortunately, the car bomb did not detonate.

The terrorist turned out to be Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen. And, not surprisingly, Shahzad wasn’t upset about the health care bill. After pleading guilty in court he said, “I consider myself a Mujahid, a Muslim-soldier.” He was upset, as he put it, over “American occupation of Muslim Lands.”

Shortly after the attack, Bloomberg prematurely asserted that there was no evidence suggesting the bomber was part of any recognized terror network. Shahzad later told the court he trained with the Pakistani Taliban to learn bomb-making and other related skills.

Could it be that Bloomberg has underestimated the threat of Islamist terror, or is there another agenda?

The issue has again become relevant in recent days. The New York Times ran a series of articles and editorials blaming the NYPD for using the film The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America as part of their counter-terrorism training.

The articles calling the film “a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims” and a “Hateful Film” are riddled with inaccuracies and omissions.

Following publication of the articles, Mayor Bloomberg stated that NYPD used “terrible judgment” in showing the film, despite admitting that he had never seen it.

We were not aware that the NYPD was using the film, but when we learned of it some months ago, we were pleased that the officers would have an opportunity to learn about the indoctrination taking place in certain segments of Muslim society in America. The film reveals what viewers are unlikely to see on the evening news: What terrorists, radical preachers and Islamists are saying in their own words, in their own mosques and media, to their followers.

The film exposes how radicals employ the dual strategies of “violent Jihad,” along with a “cultural Jihad,” through which Islamist groups use coercion and non-violent means to gradually expand their influence over Western society.

Now, Mayor Bloomberg, The New York Times and others want to bar law enforcement officers from seeing the film. The question is, why?

We reject, outright, the charge that our film is anti-Muslim or that it casts a shadow over the entire Muslim community. In fact, we go to great lengths throughout the film to differentiate the radical Islamists from peaceful Muslims. The film is narrated by, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim-American, who has dedicated his life to exposing the threat of radical Islam.

Our critics have failed to mention these points and have chosen not to challenge the film on the merits of its thesis or content.

Perhaps the reason Mayor Bloomberg wants The Third Jihad banned is the same reason he insinuated the Times Square bomber was a health care terrorist — namely, CAIR.

CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) is one of many Muslim interest groups that purport to represent the Islamic community in America but in reality have well established ties to Hamas and other terror groups.

CAIR was designated by the U.S. Justice Department for its role in terror financing during the nation’s largest-ever trial on the subject. As a result, the FBI has officially severed all ties with the “advocacy organization.”

Outside of its support for terror organizations, CAIR works to quickly and effectively to silence any discussions about radical Islam by playing the racism card and accusing critics of Islamophobia. CAIR’s devices are effective.

As soon as the current story broke, CAIR immediately branded the film “anti-Muslim propaganda” in a press release. This was followed by a CAIR-led protest on the steps of City Hall calling for the resignation of the NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly.

The entire episode could have been a chapter in The Third Jihad. We are now seeing “cultural Jihad” in action. In order to avoid agitating Muslim constituents, Mayor Bloomberg  and Commissioner Kelly are backing away from the film, regardless of its merits.

The net result is that CAIR, a designated Muslim interest group with ties to terror financing, is now telling the NYPD how it should go about fighting terror. If that’s not the ultimate act of subversion, I don’t know what is.

Today, we receives yet another disturbing and frightening report that reveals just how little our Entertainment Overlords value the First Amendment and the true concept of artistic freedom:

Tracy Morgan met with a group of homeless gay teens and families who have lost loved ones to hate crimes Friday in New York City. The gathering was organized by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) following homophobic remarks made by the 30 Rock star during a June 3 show in Nashville, Tenn.

Morgan has since apologized for his remarks and announced Friday that he’ll return to Tennessee on June 21 to ask pardon from those offended when he said he’d “pull out a knife and stab” his son if he were gay. …

Morgan’s stage remarks caused an uproar, with NBC Entertainment chief Robert Greenblatt and Tina Fey both issuing statements in response to them. “I speak for NBC and myself personally when I say we do not condone hate or violence of any kind and I am pleased to see Tracy Morgan apologizing for recent homophobic remarks in his standup appearance,” Greenblatt said.

Fey also said she was happy her co-star apologized saying “I want to apologize to my fans and the gay & lesbian community for my choice of words at my recent stand-up act in Nashville” in a statement to THR.

If you read the full piece, you’ll see that comedian Chris Rock stood up for Morgan (kind of) and that Wanda Sykes bizarrely blames the State of Tennessee for all of this. Sadly, Morgan’s “30 Rock” co-stars, Alec Baldwin and  Cheyenne Jackson both joined Tina Fey in throwing Morgan under the bus. And by doing so, these artistic cowards have only encouraged the guardians of Hollywood’s New PC-Production Code to keep on keeping on.  How ironic — but in a fascist kind of way.

Hollywood’s original Production Code (1930 – 1968), a self-imposed set of morality guidelines created by the studio system, never fails to receive anything but scorn from today’s liberals who look back on it as a relic of puritanical censorship that stifled creative freedom. That’s an unfair charge, though. If you watch films created under the watchful eye of this code, no subject matter was ever off-limits. Many films, especially the grittier fare that came out of studios like Warner Bros., examined all kinds of hot button issues including anti-war themes, incest, adultery, racism, anti-Semitism, the allure of crime, homosexuality, and even a complicated looks at the Church and Christian faith.

Unlike today, the old Production Code didn’t  stop anyone from saying anything. What was regulated was “how”something was said and/or portrayed — and though I oppose any kind of artistic restriction, a very convincing case can be made that these restrictions made films better, smarter, and infinitely more clever. 

Today’s PC-Production Code is much worse.  Instead of the Catholic Church wielding all the muscle, now it’s left-wing special interest groups like CAIR and GLAAD going so far as to say portraying Muslim terrorists as Muslim terrorists is something called “Islamophobia” and a joke about electric cars being is bullying hate speech. This is not only absurd, it’s a form of censorship through the Orwellian notion of repressive tolerance.

Worse still, today’s PC-Production code is completely arbitrary and discriminatory. It’s just a fact that when it comes to protecting from “offense,” some groups are more equal than others. Had Tracy Morgan joked about stabbing his Tea Partying son to death, there might have been some complaints from the right (nothing wrong with debate or answering back), but do you think Morgan would currently be on a nation-wide humiliation tour visiting Tea Party groups. What about Christians or Mormons or conservatives?

Of course not.

Furthermore, no respected right-of-center group would ever demand such a fascistic re-education. At the most, they might pray for Morgan against his will or simply invite him to an event to get know who he’s mocking better.

I’m no Tracy Morgan fan but what’s happening to the “30 Rock” star right now is downright un-American.

Hopefully, I’ll live long enough to see a new Hollywood generation arise that looks back on this awful and chilling and creatively stifling era with a “never again” attitude.

Anyway, it’s all due to comments Juan made on the “The O’Reilly Factor,” last Monday. There Bill asked him to respond to “The cold truth [that] jihad, aided …by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.”

Williams replied, “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot….But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Racist.

He also brought up the Times Square scumbag – who had no problem saying that the war with America is just beginning.

But as Slate points out, the passage quoted by NPR was a spoon-fed clip that dumps out before Williams says his worry reflects the problem of generalizing about groups of people.

I doubt Media Matters will cover that.

But anyway, you could say NPR fired him for being honest. For saying what everyone with a brain is thinking (which eliminates Media Matters).

But I think they fired him for being interesting. That’s a huge rule-breaker on NPR – a substance that makes Ambien feel like Adderall.

But as for the firing, it’s really just another feather in the hypocritical cap called tolerance. Who wears that cap? Well, those on the left who believe everyone is entitled to their views – unless of course, they aren’t their views.

And, of course, this is the same media who avoids anything that might upset Muslims – a group they tell us we shouldn’t fear. Yet, they’re silent about Mohammad cartoons and fatwas on female cartoonists. That’s the real stinker: while Juan explained his nervousness about Islam, he only mentioned what those cowards in the media feels, but denies.

So they canned him.

Which should be a feather in his cap.

And if you disagree with me, you’re a racist, homophobic featherphobe.

Tonight, we’ve got:

Diana Falzone!

Bill Hemmer!

Ali Nejad!

a new exclusive animation!

and other stuff!

According to Nikki Finke, Universal sent a trailer of the upcoming film The Dilemma, directed by Ron Howard and starring Vince Vaughn, to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) in order to get their blessing. Universal claims that GLAAD had no problem with the trailer, but a press release issued by GLAAD says they did:

After reviewing, GLAAD called on Universal to remove the scene where the word ‘gay’ was used as a pejorative from the trailer. Today, after Anderson Cooper also spoke out against the scene, Universal confirmed to GLAAD that the offensive joke will be removed from promotional campaigns from this point forward, including in the trailer currently playing in movie theatres.

Kind of hilarious, isn’t it, that Anderson Cooper, who made plenty of jokes on television about “teabagging” at the expense of Tea Partiers, would complain about the word “gay” being used as a pejorative? But that’s neither here nor there. And the point of this post is not to debate whether saying “that’s so gay” or whatever is offensive enough to be scrubbed from the American lexicon, and whether one group should have the power to make that decision.

No, the point of this post is to ask some very serious questions: Why did Universal feel the need to send its trailer to GLAAD for their PC benediction in the first place? Does Universal send their trailers to other special interest groups for vetting too? What about other studios? Do they make it a regular practice to send trailers to GLAAD, the NAACP, PETA, NOW, CAIR, and others? And does it stop at trailers? What about scripts? Previews? Merchandising ideas?

Pardon me, but I was under the impression that true artistes don’t worry about what other people think. I thought the point of any kind of artistic expression was to, well, express oneself without regard to public opinion and when certain members of said public complain about being offended by said art, those “in the know” thumb their noses at the scoffers and call them Philistines, Bible-thumpers and other choice names.

But whatever. If Hollywood is worried about offending its viewing public, then Big Hollywood wants in on the pre-screening process. Our very own Sucker Punch Squad has been instrumental in exposing the bias against conservatives and conservatism in many movies. In fact, Big Hollywood as a whole exists to call Hollywoodists out on their bias and provide a platform for conservatives in the entertainment business to voice their opinions on the issues of the day.

We’re sure that it was a simple oversight on the part of Hollywoodists that Big Hollywood has yet to be consulted in the all-important matter of keeping movies free of material offensive to you, the conservative consumer.

Wouldn’t you agree that Big Hollywood could provide indispensable advice to screenwriters, directors, studio bigs and distributors as to what is considered offensive, demeaning and politically incorrect to their conservative audience? An audience that, according to a highly reputable polling group,  makes up the largest demographic in America? Only a year ago, a Gallup poll revealed that conservatives form the single greatest ideological group in the US, including so-called moderates, with conservatives outnumbering liberals in all 50 states (yes, that’s 50 states, not 57 - check your atlas). And that was before Obamacare passed! With the upcoming midterm election looking to be a washout for Democrats and a watershed year for Republicans, currying the favor of conservatives could be a very wise move for Hollywood. Cha-ching!

So, Hollywoodists, take note! Big Hollywood is at your disposal. If your goal is to avoid offending conservative consumers who might want to spend their hard-earned money on your product, we’re here to help! We hope people like writer/director Adam McKay will give us a call so we can help him with his eternal quest to Speak! Truth! To! Power!

The hotline is open - 24 hours, 7 days a week.

Norris, a Seattle cartoonist, was the unfortunate, creative mind who conceived of “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.” Ironically, her satirical comment on the demise of free speech in America led to protests and death threats from fundamentalists Muslims, who apparently take cartooning very seriously. Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who became an al-Qaida leader, then issued a fatwa. According to this man of God, the mere suggestion that people should draw Muhammad was cause for assassination. The FBI then suggested that Norris “go ghost,” which is to say, move from her home, change her name, stop drawing her cartoon—essentially wipe away any trace of her existence. Molly Norris is dead! So too, apparently is the American notion of freedom of speech as well as any vestige of American back-bone. Since when can those living in other parts of the world threaten American citizens with impunity?

It’s too bad that Norris didn’t pick-on Christians. Imagine if, instead of encouraging her fellow cartoonists to draw Muhammad, Norris had implored them to draw Jesus Christ. Sure, she would have been the subject of a few fiery Sunday sermons, received some nasty letters, and even been the object of some loud protests, but she would still have her life. In fact, there are even those Christians that would have prayed for her, rejoicing that drawing Christ might be the first step in coming to Christ.

Moreover, she may have even become a star in the artistic community, celebrated as a “provocative, post modernist, commentator on contemporary religious life.” But, alas, she chose to throw a punch at Islam and practitioners of the “religion of peace” threatened to kill her.

And the guardians of free speech—those same good folks that expressed such indignation at protesters of the Ground Zero mosque, that would have hailed her as a hero had she pointed her pencil at born-again Christians—have simply shrugged their shoulders and whispered, “what a shame. I knew Molly when.”

Clifford May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, notes that:

The saga of Molly Norris has elicited hardly any notice from political leaders, elite journalists, and celebrities. Nor has it stirred to action [among] those who claim to represent America’s Islamic community. Nor have I seen anything from Human Rights Watch. The ACLU is actually defending al-Awlaki. At the UN, Islamic countries are pushing to ban criticism of Islam under international law.

Indeed, there has been no outrage expressed by the moderate Muslim community. Other than the remarks of the Seattle area executive director of CAIR, the organization has had little to say. Celebrities have not turned out in mass to decry the injustice. And sadly, this president, who felt compelled to lecture Americans about the constitutional rights of Muslims to build a mosque anywhere they desired (a right NO ONE was questioning), has not felt moved to rhetorically defend the right of Molly Norris to her life. Ironically, rather than defend Norris, celebrities, journalists, and politicians are still choosing to lecture Americans about the increase in Islamaphobia.

There should now be little doubt that the cultural elites are in fact cultural bullies and like most bullies, deep down they are cowards. The proof is discovered in the silence with which they have greeted the death of Norris and in the fact that as of yet, no artist has deigned to toss elephant dung on a Muslim icon or have sex with the Koran. No. They stick to the easier fare of fundamentalist Christianity.

In some sense, it makes perfect sense. The fact is that we Christians can be annoying. Christians tend to consult God about, well, everything. We all know Christians who have consulted the Lord about everything from their health to which shoes to purchase on sale. And there is all the moralizing! Christians have a habit of preaching about “living the right way,” and warning all within ear-shot to get right with God.

For some, this behavior can be downright bothersome. Who are all these smiling, flawed people to comment on the behavior of others? It is therefore little wonder that Christians take so much abuse and criticism. It might also be because Christians tend to pray for those that persecute them, not assassinate them.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has muscled its way into being the go-to Muslim-American mouthpiece for the benefit of the lazy and complicit mainstream media – including The O’Reilly Factor, where Awad recently appeared and attempted to smear the opponents of the planned Ground Zero monument to Islamic supremacism. He works tirelessly to advance the stealth jihad agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, for which CAIR is a front group.

At Kuta, Awad spoke to students, professors, and the dean about “the international image of Islam,” which he claimed had been “subject to insult and distortions since the first Crusade.” He also presented practical steps that Muslims can follow to teach the world about Islam.

(“Teach the world about Islam”? I think the world has already been learning a whole hell of a lot about Islam ever since 9/11, except for the willfully blind, such as New York’s 2010 Dhimmi-of-the-Year frontrunner, Mayor Bloomberg. But I digress.)

Regarding these “insults and distortions,” Awad pointed to the culpability of the Western media, especially in the field of cinema, claiming that “one Hollywood company alone created 800 films about Muslims in the last three decades in which it presented the figure of the Arabs and Muslims from an Israeli point of view.”

This is either a bad translation or the kind of hyperbolic conspiracy theory that passes for fact in the Muslim world, where propaganda outlets like al-Jazeera spread anti-Western disinformation and lies, such as the notion that thousands of Jewish workers at the World Trade Center suspiciously stayed home on 9/11 (Iran’s own Dr. Evil, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reaffirmed this ludicrous charge as recently as last Saturday). No Hollywood company at all has made 800 films in the last three decades, much less 800 that featured and denigrated Arabs and Muslims.

The numbers he’s referring to may be from the work of Jack Shaheen, an Arab-American (but non-Muslim) academic and pro-Palestinian apologist who has built a career on judging Hollywood’s purported anti-Arab racism and discrimination. In his books such as Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, he has scoured nearly 1000 movies for possible evidence of the stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims. Of course, striving for a balanced depiction is not the aim; his real goal, like CAIR’s, seems to be to ensure that no depictions of Muslim terrorists are allowed, and that no connection is made between Islam and terrorism.

Since long before 9/11, CAIR has worked hard to steer Hollywood productions toward more and more sanitized depictions of Islam and Muslims, most famously in the 2002 film The Sum of All Fears, in which the filmmakers were convinced to swap out the original novel’s Islamic bad guys for a less politically insensitive choice, neo-Nazis (yawn). And yet CAIR was initially frustrated with Hollywood’s progress; at a White House rally almost exactly a year prior to the 9/11 attacks, Awad asserted that “Hollywood has not been our ally. Hollywood has distorted the facts. Hollywood has shown freedom fighters as terrorists. Hollywood has done the work that Zionists could not done [sic].”

How things have changed since 9/11. Apart from Obama himself, the Islamists almost couldn’t have a better friend than Hollywood now. The whole story of Hollywood’s multiculturalist appeasement and complicity with stealth jihad is a fascinating one which I can’t do justice to here, so keep an eye peeled for my book next year. For now let’s look at one specific example of how Hollywood has absorbed the Islamist influence and become their ally; in fact, since Awad brought up the Crusades in his Kuta speech, let’s choose an appropriate film – 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven.

Kingdom of Heaven is a Ridley Scott-directed epic starring Orlando Bloom and Liam Neeson about the Crusades and the battle for Jerusalem. Unsurprisingly, per Hollywood’s usual morally inverted worldview, the film depicts the Crusaders as uncouth murderers and hypocrites, and Muslims as more dignified and morally superior.

But, you ask, the Crusaders weren’t all saints, right? Didn’t they commit some atrocities? Of course – it was the Middle Ages, for God’s sake (pun intended). Those were brutal, cruel times. The point is that where this Clash of Civilizations is concerned, Hollywood has, since 9/11, almost invariably gone out of its way to assist Islamists like Awad in “clarifying the image of Islam in the West,” as he would put it – in other words, rewriting history, denigrating Christianity and the West, and whitewashing Islam.

In Kingdom, for example, Jerusalem collapses under assault from the Saracen forces led by the legendary general Saladin. Saladin is shown to be a paragon of interfaith tolerance who offers medical assistance to his Christian opponent and spares Jerusalem’s Christian defenders – although the inconvenient historical fact is that the Crusaders were required to buy their freedom, and those who couldn’t afford it were sold into slavery.

Before the battle, Orlando Bloom’s character tells the Christian defenders of Jerusalem that no one – Jew, Christian, or Muslim – has claim to the city: “All have claim.” He urges them not to fight for the city itself, only the people within. This interfaith nonsense would have been unthinkable to the Crusaders, who had devoted their lives to recovering Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim occupation and imperialism in the first place.

After Bloom’s character strikes a deal to spare Jerusalem’s defenders, the Saracens take the city and Saladin enters a church, where he makes a point of uprighting a fallen crucifix, showing an interfaith respect that he didn’t in real life. When the real Saladin entered Jerusalem, his men ravaged many of the churches and all had their crosses removed. But of course, in multicultural Hollywood only Christians can be depicted as religiously intolerant.

One academic dismissed Kingdom of Heaven as “Osama bin Laden’s version of history.” CAIR, however, which was given a private screening by Ridley Scott, declared the film to be “a balanced and positive depiction of Islamic culture during the Crusades.” News flash: anytime CAIR praises your work, you’re on the wrong side of the issue.

The film also made use of an academic consultant, Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian-American intellectual who hurls accusations of racism and Western imperialism as reflexively as a Tourette’s sufferer. Dabashi was also the consultant on the 2005 Oscar-nominated movie Paradise Now, a sympathetic portrayal of two Palestinian suicide bombers. He describes Israel as “a racist apartheid state” and “a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States.”

With this kind of “balanced and positive” perspective in the mix, no wonder CAIR approved of Kingdom of Heaven, which grossed $208 million while telling the world that: Christians are ruthless hypocrites who refuse to fight for a cause higher than their own lives; Jews and Christians have no special claim to Jerusalem; and Muslims are religiously tolerant and culturally superior. The film is a perfect example of how Nihad Awad would like to “clarify the image of Islam in the West.”

CAIR and pro-Islamist academics aren’t the only ones keeping up the pressure on Hollywood. Another Muslim Brotherhood front group, MPAC, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, even has a busy Hollywood Bureau, which indoctrinates educates filmmakers about Muslim customs and issues, offers script approval consultation, and hands out awards to Hollywood people and projects whose work depicts Muslims and Islam in a favorable light (past winners have included Michael Moore and Alec Baldwin). The Bureau also seeks to “connect aspiring Muslim filmmakers, writers and actors to Hollywood professionals.” Just last week MPAC and Film Independent, the non-profit organization for indie filmmakers, held a Los Angeles networking mixer (if you didn’t see it announced on Film Independent’s website calendar, that’s because it wasn’t there; I was given a heads-up about it – again – by IPT.)

MPAC Award Winner

Why is any of this important? Because while violent jihad is a serious issue, the cultural front is where this Clash of Civilization and Barbarism will be won or lost. Islamists who are patiently but assiduously working to tear down Western civilization are shrewdly crafting Hollywood’s subversive messages to the world. Is Hollywood as diligent in propagating a pro-American, pro-Western, anti-sharia narrative to export to the world?

I think we all know the answer to that.

Tamsir Lucien Mendy

At least, if you listened to The Council on American-Islamic Relations. Upon hearing the news of the crime, they reacted the way you’d expect. Says, CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper…

“Given the recent wave of incidents targeting American mosques, a possible bias motive for this apparent arson attack must be considered… Unfortunately, there is a vocal minority in our society promoting anti-Muslim bigotry, and that minority is experiencing little or no pushback from mainstream religious and political leaders.”

Uh yeah, I wish he’d expand on all these incidents, but maybe he’ll be too busy removing egg from his face. That’s because fire investigators have pretty much figured out who set fire to the mosque, and it’s a dude named Tamsir Lucien Mendy. Investigators said Mendy belongs to the congregation.

Now, if you were to ask me, I’d say it’s really hard to be an anti-Muslim bigot, when you’re a Muslim. But knowing CAIR, I doubt they’ll let that silly detail clog up their angry ideology: its only goal is not to bridge differences, but to foment conflict throughtthe idea of backlash – especially since no such phenomenon exists.

Which is why, they will still claim backlash, even when it’s Muslim on Muslim crime. And they’re right! Perhaps the stress of potential backlash wore Mendy down, and he had no choice but to beat the backlashers to the punch, by torching the mosque first.

In a way, it was an act of defiant solidarity – and we, the west, are all to blame for this act of intolerance. And if you don’t see that, you’re probably a racist homophobe who torches mosques on weekends.

TONIGHT:

Mike Baker!

Remi Spencer!

Andrew Wilco!

That was the arrogant declaration of victory from the Organization of the Islamic Conference nearly two years ago, regarding the shrewdly orchestrated Muslim mayhem around the world protesting such infidel abominations as the Danish Muhammad cartoons and Geert Wilders’ short film Fitna.

“Red lines” indeed – a phrase chillingly reminiscent of Samuel Huntington’s famous observation that “Islam has bloody borders.” Except that the red lines the OIC is referring to aren’t geographical – they are the ever-tightening limits that Muslim fundamentalists are imposing to choke off our freedoms.

The influential OIC is the world’s largest Muslim assembly, consisting of 57 member states (you know, the same number of U.S. states candidate Obama campaigned in). Its primary aim is “conducting a large-scale worldwide effort to confront Islamophobia.” (As I’ve written here before, Islamophobia is a mythical beast that the OIC and collusive groups like CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, use to intimidate us into craven appeasement.) Their goal is to abridge our free speech by making criticism of Islam an international crime; their strategy works because the West has been so emasculated by multiculturalism that we’d rather embrace cultural suicide than offend the tender sensibilities of such violent barbarians as the Danish cartoon rioters.

Everyone is aware by now that Comedy Central’s South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone were targeted by a not-so-subtle threat from Zachary “Abu Talhah Al-Amrikee” Chesser, the leader of a small New York-based group of fanatics at RevolutionMuslim.com. Chesser found the fearless South Park satirists guilty of an insulting depiction of Islam’s prophet Muhammad as someone who – wait for it – cannot be depicted without incurring death threats. To drive his point home, Chesser posted a picture of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh lying on an Amsterdam sidewalk, shot several times in broad daylight by an unrepentant Islamic fundamentalist, his throat cut, a machete stuck in his chest and a note calling for holy war pinned to him with a second knife. The message was clear – van Gogh had been executed for insulting Islam with his short film Submission, and now Parker and Stone can expect the same fate.

The site RevolutionMuslim.com is now down, but at the related RevolutionMuslim.blogspot.com is an exhaustingly wide-ranging, unapologetic declaration with the catchy title, “Clarifying the South Park Response and Calling on Others to Join in the Defense of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him).” Far from backing off from the implied threat, the declaration’s poster – presumably Chesser – launches into an anti-American rant and a scholarly justification for Islam’s position that the punishment for blasphemy is death. He stresses that it is absolutely incumbent upon all Muslims to abide by sharia law, so any Muslim who “condones” South Park’s behavior does not possess “even the weakest of faith.” So much for moderate Islam.

But what about freedom of speech? “As Muslims we do not define speech which has no place in a moral society as ‘free speech.’” Indeed, free speech “is not a value that the Muslims share with America as a whole.” The declaration closes with an ominous quote from Chesser’s idol Osama bin Laden: “If there is no check in the freedom of your words, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions.” Well there it is, then. We can either curb our speech, or cross that red line and deal with the consequences from Muslims who are commanded, by Islamic law, to execute us.

In reporting on this controversy, the media have, as usual, resorted to their fallback narrative of describing Islamic fundamentalists as “loners” and “crazy people” who have hijacked what would otherwise be the Religion of Peace. The danger in these dismissive labels is that we mistakenly view the terrorists as isolated nut jobs, when in fact they are united by a common goal – the capitulation of the West and the establishment of sharia worldwide – and they are perfectly capable of articulating and ideologically justifying it. Whether the dozen or so members of Revolution Muslim and the 57-member states of the OIC are officially linked or not, they are working toward the same end.

CAIR’s ubiquitous spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper calls Revolution Muslim “an extreme fringe group” that is smearing Islam with its “outrageous, irresponsible” statements. But CAIR hasn’t issued a formal statement about the affair, ostensibly because it doesn’t want to give South Park any more attention. Too bad, because amid all this uproar, CAIR is throwing away a golden opportunity to explain exactly how these “crazies” have “hijacked” the religion. This would be the perfect time to discredit their “outrageous, irresponsible” distortions, wouldn’t it? And to stand with the South Park creators in defense of free speech?

Instead, Hooper would rather move on because “people are pretty tired of this whole ‘Let’s insult the prophet Muhammad thing.’”  They are? I wasn’t aware that there even was a “whole ‘Let’s insult the prophet Muhammad thing.’” It’s not like it was ever a wildly popular fad, since anyone deemed to have insulted Muhammad ordinarily ends up dead or living under 24-hour guard.

Actually Mr. Hooper, what people are pretty tired of is Islamic violence and open intimidation, attacks on our freedoms and rights, and false charges of racism and Islamophobia. What people are pretty tired of, in short, is the whole, “Let’s behead those who insult Islam thing.”

The Los Angeles Times claims that such threats present a dilemma for media companies, who are “struggling to balance free speech with safety concerns and religious sensitivities.” This is giving them way too much credit. The media and the entertainment industry care absolutely nothing about religious sensitivities; if anything, they normally delight in mocking and sneering at faith, especially Christianity. But they treat Islam with kid gloves because, as Fox’s Bill O’Reilly said, “these people are killers and they will kill you.”

Nor do media companies care about free speech except when it suits them. They shut down politically inconvenient truths, such as Disney/ABC’s shameful suppression of The Path to 9/11 miniseries, which I have written about here. And they fold (like a Bedouin tent, as Mark Steyn hilariously put it) at the first hint of Muslim disapproval. No amount of Christian offense would compel Comedy Central to rein in South Park’s depiction of Jesus defecating on the American flag, but in the wake of the Revolution Muslim threat, Comedy Central decided to bleep over any subsequent reference to “Prophet Muhammad,” and his visual portrayal was replaced with a black “Censored” bar. There’s a reason Islam means “submission,” and Comedy Central has exemplified it.

And as for media companies’ “safety concerns”: every time they cave in to Islamist threats of violence, the terrorists win, as the corny saying goes. It quite simply encourages our enemy to ramp up the threats, which then endangers even more innocents.

The OIC boasted about “red lines that should not be crossed” – well, the time has come for Hollywood to stop placating these murderous zealots in its usual way, with knee-jerk self-censorship, and to draw a line in the sand of our own, against religious totalitarianism. In the absence of any government acknowledgement that fundamentalist Islam is a serious threat to our way of life, the entertainment industry must rally behind Parker and Stone, and take the lead in a cultural counteroffensive against the jihadists.

Unless Americans stand shoulder-to-shoulder against such assaults on our hard-won Western values, Islamic fundamentalists will continue to be more effective at importing sharia law than we are at exporting democracy. We must stand for our principles and freedoms with an even greater degree of unwavering fervor and cultural pride than the jihadists possess. Or make no mistake, we will all be witness to the slow, humiliating death of Western civilization.

To quote Dolly Parton, here we go again. Groups like CAIR rarely have their priorities in place -they’re always “reacting angrily” to perceived slights or hypothetical backlashes – when they really should be reacting angrily to those who commit atrocities in the name of Islam.

But you know who really gets my gopher? Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He says the gun sights not only give our enemies a propaganda tool, but adds, “I don’t have to wonder … how the American public would react if citations from the Koran were being inscribed onto these U.S. armed forces gun sights instead.”

Now, I believe Weinstein has lost more marbles than a blind man playing Kerplunk. Whether or not Bible references should be on rifles is a decent debate, but they will never lead to extremist-driven violence. Terrorists, however, always champion their radical Islamic code – and the Ft. Hood shooter more than connected that dot before slaughtering innocent Americans. But even the most radical Christians don’t fly planes into buildings.

But look, American soldiers usually shoot terrorists well before they get close enough to see these Bible references, anyway.

That alone should prevent hurt feelings.

Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Patti Anne Browne

a comedian to be named later!

Cheer’s John Ratzenberger!

and perhaps some Robot Theater

P.S. Remember to also catch me on the O’Reilly Factor tonight!

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A prominent national Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization today called on HBO to apologize for an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in which the main character splattered urine on a painting of Jesus.

SEE: Larry David Blasted for ‘Curb’ Episode Where He Urinates on Jesus Painting http://tinyurl.com/hboepisode

In a letter to HBO Chairman and CEO Bill Nelson, Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) wrote:

“It is beyond tasteless to insult the religious sensibilities of billions of people in America and around the world with such a cheap and vulgar publicity stunt. Jesus, peace be upon him, is loved and revered by both Christians and Muslims. Muslims view him as one of God’s greatest messengers to mankind.

“The Quran, Islam’s revealed text, states: ‘Behold! The angels said: “O Mary! God gives you glad tidings of a Word from Him. His name will be Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, held in honor in this world and the Hereafter and in (the company of) those nearest to God.” (The Holy Quran, 3:45)

“The Prophet Muhammad said: ‘Both in this world and in the hereafter, I am the nearest of all people to Jesus, the son of Mary. The prophets are paternal brothers; their mothers are different, but their religion is one.’

“We understand the drive for ratings, but no one benefits from such a crude attempt to boost the network’s bottom line by manufacturing a religious controversy. HBO should apologize.”

Awad added that American Muslim television viewers contacted CAIR to express their concerns about the HBO episode.

CAIR is America’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.