So, in a blinding feat of profound wussiness, the Washington Post removed the October 3rd “Non Sequitur” cartoon from its rag. The reason? It mentioned Muhammad. Let me repeat: it was yanked because it “mentioned” – not showed – Muhammad.

There wasn’t a picture of him in the strip.

But the Post, and some other papers, still pulled it.

Admirably, Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander asked his Style editor why- and he said, “it seemed a deliberate provocation without a clear message.” He added that “the point of the joke was not immediately clear.”

Yeah. That’s why you did it: ambiguity. Weasel.

Anyway, here’s the cartoon. (more…)

So last week I coined a new disorder, called Islamophobia-phobia, or fear of being labeled Islamophobic.

As you already know, Islamophobia is defined as a fear of Muslims. So Islamophobia-phobia is a real fear of a perceived fear.

So, who are the culprits behind the disease?

Jackasses in the media.

To quote a perceptive tweet by a dude whose handle is “politics of fear:”

“How can the media say were Islamophobic, when we all died from avian/swine flu?”

That’s it, nutshell-wise.

The fact is, there is no group more quick to judge, more prone to exaggeration or sensationalism than the media. They are the haymakers of hysteria. The litany of scares propagated by the media is so long, that if I were to list them, you would fall asleep, dropping your bong shaped like the head of Robert Bork. (more…)

So at that bug lamp for bozos known as the Huffington Post, media mogul Russell Simmons says opposition to the mosque being built near Ground Zero amounts to bigotry, or more specifically, Islamophobia.
He writes:

…in my backyard, I have no tolerance for a new fear-mongering, hateful rhetoric that has sprung up over the proposed …center ….we know that we must fight Antisemitism and Islamaphobia together ….Let us pass this test with grace and dignity. As I will not stand for any sort of Islamaphobia in my backyard.

Now, this is a key point – because, like Simmons, I also think fear of Islam plays a role. But the fear lurks within folks like Simmons who fear ticking off Islam, or worse – looking intolerant.

And also – it’s a fear of debate. Rather than argue against my point that it’s simply obnoxious to build the mosque, they’d rather reflexively belch “race!”

Islamophobia?

Please. (more…)

“We sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed.”

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. (more…)

This past January, London’s Daily Star tabloid announced urgently that an upcoming episode – “the most controversial episode ever”! – of The Simpsons on the Sky1 network “pokes fun at Islam” and “is certain to enrage Muslim fanatics.” As anyone who morbidly follows this sort of thing (as I do) knows, enraging Muslim fanatics is hardly an accomplishment of Halley’s Comet-like rarity. It doesn’t take much: books, cartoons, teddy bears named Mohammad, posters of puppies, piggy banks, a Burger King ice cream swirl and the Nike logo (both of which apparently too closely resembled the Arabic script for “Allah”), are just a few of the recent Western offenses that have sparked their frothing outrage worldwide.

Yet despite the Daily Star’s perversely hopeful tone, there was no violent reaction in the UK from said fanatics, nor was there one in the United States after the episode originally aired here last Thanksgiving weekend (in a grimly ironic twist, the same weekend as the devastating mass murder and mayhem committed in Mumbai by a band of – wait for it – Muslim fanatics, or as the culturally sensitive media preferred to call them at the time, “gunmen”). So why no Muslim fury over The Simpsons? (more…)