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Maybe a better name for Jon Stewart’s rally would’ve been “Multicultural-Sensitivity Suicide Rally.” Or maybe Colbert wasn’t kidding about keeping the fear alive. According to Nick Cohen at Standpoint, Salman Rushdie, the author forced into hiding for years because of the Cat Stevens (Yusaf Islam) approved fatwa on his head, is just as confused as everyone else:

“I’ve always liked Stewart and Colbert but what on earth was Cat Yusuf Stevens Islam doing on that stage? If he’s a “good Muslim” like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar then I’m the Great Pumpkin. Happy Halloween.”

Stevens-Islam has been trying to backtrack from his comments for some time now, claiming they were some kind of joke. Does he look like he’s putting everyone on in that video? Rushdie isn’t buying the joke excuse either:

However much Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam may wish to rewrite his past, he was neither misunderstood nor misquoted over his views on the Khomeini fatwa against The Satanic Verses (Seven, April 29). In an article in The New York Times on May 22, 1989, Craig R Whitney reported Stevens/Islam saying on a British television programme “that rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author Salman Rushdie, ‘I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing’.”

He added that “if Mr Rushdie turned up at his doorstep looking for help, ‘I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I’d try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is’.”

In a subsequent interview with The New York Times, Mr Whitney added, Stevens/Islam, who had seen a preview of the programme, said that he “stood by his comments”.

Let’s have no more rubbish about how “green” and innocent this man was.

Had Stevens/Islam apologized and renounced his despicable call for Rushdie’s execution, that might be different. Instead, he’s quite obviously lying about making what would be a sick and dangerous joke anyway, and the only person on the planet who appears to believe him is Jon Stewart.

Where is the “sanity” and “moderation” in allowing such a man to perform at your predominantly white political event?

Who will Stewart and Colbert invite to their 2012 rally? Mimes who approve of shooting abortion doctors? Interpretative dance as performed by The Timothy McVeigh Had a Point League?

Ms. Norris is a cartoonist who stood up for freedom of speech…for awhile. After the animated show “South Park” bowed to pressure and threats and removed a piece from a show showing the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit, Ms. Norris started a movement called “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.” The idea took off and groups both left and right got behind the idea of standing up for freedom of expression.

Radical Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki

Some liberal cowards like Atlanta Journal Constitution “political cartoonist” Mike Luckovich didn’t join in because they were already aware of the way Islamic critics give a bad review. As were the folks at one of my favorite shows “The Simpsons.” After the “South Park” incident they had Bart do his punishment on the chalk board by writing, “South Park – We’d stand beside you if we weren’t so scared.”

I’m not sure of Molly Norris’ political leanings but after her crusade for freedom took off, she backed away. She apologized to Muslims for offending them. She was honest as to why she was backing away when she drew a cartoon with herself saying, “I said that I wanted to counter fear and then I got afraid.”

Unfortunately for Ms. Norris, Islamic fundamentalists tend to hold grudges. Ask Theo Van Gogh, the recently deceased Dutch filmmaker or Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard who also has been repeatedly targeted by terrorists for drawing Muhammad. Last February, he was attacked by a man with an ax who, inspired by jihad, tried to kill him. Ask Salman Rushdie who probably still looks over his shoulder even though he has allegedly been removed from a fatwa as a condition of normalizing relations between Iran and Britain.

The art critic who Ms. Norris has aggravated is none other than that Fort Hood inspiring American born jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki. He has reportedly said her proper abode is hell. Ms. Norris’ website is down and it has been reported that the police are watching her house.

It’s no wonder that other “edgy” artists like Madonna, Lady Gaga and Sarah Silverman tend to pick on Christianity.

It’s a whole lot safer.

Recently the film’s British director Danny Boyle, serving as jury president of the 12th Shanghai Film Festival, confided during a panel discussion that on “Slumdog” he had shed the patronizing, “imperialist” mentality, relying heavily on a local Indian crew. Boyle also observed that while it was “regrettable” that Beijing imposed censorship restrictions on its filmmakers, he’d nonetheless love to work in China, as it would be a “challenge learning Mandarin.” Boyle neglected to mention that on “Slumdog” he’d skipped the challenge of learning Hindi, necessitating an Indian co-director, and also skipped the patronizing practice of paying Western wages, and the low pay for local child actors would fuel most of the subsequent controversies.

After its national US release in January 2009, “Slumdog” received a positive critical reception in the West, with a 94% rating by Rotten Tomatoes, though some critics raised what would become ongoing issues, with “The Guardian’s” Peter Bradshaw regarding it as “an outsider’s view” and “a product placement” for the very quiz show owned by Celador, the film’s producer. But on its release in India, including in a dubbed Hindi version of this mostly (2/3) English language film, “Slumdog” did only moderate box office, especially the English version, which one trade analyst found “not ideally suited for Indian sentiment.” Indian critics mostly bought the film’s energetic ride, while others puzzled over the mix of languages and the key issue of authenticity, questioning whether the film was “a white man’s imagined India,” a superficial “poverty porn.” Even novelist Salman Rushdie was unhappy, objecting to the film’s slick yet improbable pop version of “magical realism.”

Then the issue of pay for the child actors began to make news, with the Times of India claiming Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, who played Salim as a child, was paid £700 and Rubina Ali, who played Latika, £500, with both still living in makeshift shacks in the slums of Bandra, a suburb of Mumbai. Distributor Fox Searchlight replied that for their month of work the kids were paid three times the average annual adult Bandran salary. Boyle and producer Christian Colson added that they had “paid painstaking and considered attention to how Azhar and Rubina’s involvement in the film could be of lasting benefit to them over and above the payment they received for their work.” This attention included trust funds to cover education, transportation, and expenses for the next eight years. Boyle declined to reveal the amounts of these trust funds, as this could make them “vulnerable and a target,” but according to the India Times Azhar got £17,500 in trust until age 18. His father, Mohammed Ismail, responded, “My son has taken on the world and won. I am so proud of him, but I want more money now.” Both Azhar and Rubina attended the Oscar ceremony in February, Azhar accompanied by his mother and Latika by her uncle, and soon after the Maharashtra Housing Authority announced that both kids would be given “free houses.”

In April the filmmakers responded to further charges of exploitation by donating $747,500 to a charity for the welfare of Mumbai street children, a modest amount for a film brandishing the moral authority of these destitute kids, made for only $15 million while grossing $350 million.

In May Azhar was awakened by unannounced bulldozers demolishing his Mumbai slum home as part of a drive against illegal shanties, and the next week Rubina’s shanty home was razed to make way for an overpass. Rubina and her father were briefly hospitalized, and “Slumdog” director Boyle and producer Colson then announced that in addition to the education trust and grant to charity, they were raising the amount, revealed to have been $30,000, now to $50,000, for Azhar and Rubin to purchase new apartments, as well as giving each family a lump sum of $3,000 and $130 a month stipend.

Then in June it was announced Azhar finally got his new house, a tiny 250 square foot apartment, all that $50,000 would buy in Mumbai’s hot real estate market, casting a new light on the “post-imperialist” filmmakers’ claim of munificent reward according to local standards. Crystallizing the paternalism of this whole sideshow, the ownership of the home is to be transferred from a trust to Azhar when he turns 18, provided he completes school. As if to promise the sideshow would continue, it was announced that Rubina has signed on with Random House to publish her life story, Slumgirl Dreaming: My Journey to the Stars. Boyle is reportedly reassembling his “Slumdog” team for a future project, adapting Maximun City: Bombay Lost and Found.

Back of all this noisy fallout, it’s still the film “Slumdog” Millionaire and the novel from which it is adapted, Q & A by Vikas Swarup, that raise the deeper issues. Like director Boyle wooing the Chinese, both film and novel adopt fundamentally anti-Western postures. The book’s hero, Ram Mohammad Thomas, suffers much at the hands of Catholic priests (some gay), malevolent Australian diplomats, English-speaking tourists, and Westernized figures like gangsters and movie stars (some also gay). In the film most of hero Jamal’s antagonists – police, beggar-chiefs, gangsters, the TV host (none gay), are visual figures out of Western media, a motif wickedly established when the child Jamal dunks in outhouse sewage for a photo autograph by a helicopter-borne Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan. For novelist Swarup, a diplomat from a line of distinguished Indian lawyers, there is some irony here, as he is beneficiary of the two great Britannic legacies, the English language in which he writes and which most of the film speaks and the common law.

Moreover, the very narrative hook of the novel, the improbable quiz show leading to the fulfillment of dreams of wealth and love, constructs a state of mind: what you know that is most important is simply the inscription of the injustices you have suffered. It is the epistemology of victimhood, the right answers magically accessible to the wretched, or so “it is written.”

At the heart of any current look at India is the key issue of economic development, and both the film and book display related views. Globalization in India, while bringing slick modern media and flashy urban nightlife, is viewed as little different from the old imperialism, with slums and beggars replaced by ugly concrete construction and chai wallahs in phone call centers, an extremely discontented, leftist view of globalization as simply a worldwide extension of the old exploitative gangster/hooker relationships of capitalism, enforced by oppressive police. Such is “Slumdog’s” facile, distorted view of modern India.

This year 700 million Indians voted in month-long elections that returned the secular Congress party to power, an endorsement of religious toleration in a complex land with a Hindu majority plus a minority of the world’s second largest Muslim population. Since moving away from Soviet-style socialism and protectionism, India has been growing almost as fast as China, and now contains a middle class of about 200 million people. To suggest that this enduringly secular, agonizingly multicultural, authentically democratic, free market miracle is little more than a corrupted media show is delusional. As if to repudiate the film’s facile view, the entire subsequent saga of Azhar and Rubina’s pay and housing can stand as a case study of the vulnerability of those at the bottom in the third world, not without luck but without legally recorded and capitalized property as described by economist Hernando de Soto.

Regarding the film as an “outsider’s view” of India, the filmmakers have trumpeted their veneration of Bollywood films, especially the masala genre, and “Slumdog” is full of many of its elements and conventions, notably veteran actors, the score, and the final musical production number, as a kind of assertion of authenticity. This hardly proves a “post-imperialist” mindset. Hollywood films have been voracious appropriators of international trends, notably any avant-garde style, especially since WWII, when their audience increasingly became a youth audience and their business increasingly the sale of figures and tales of rebellion, like the “New Wave” Bonnie and Clyde, to the young. Director Boyle is an accomplished contemporary film stylist, comfortable with post-modern irony and pastiche, as in his successful “Trainspotting,” a breathless pixilation of charming young lowlife junkies.

Adaptation of a novel to film is usually a process of reduction and activation, and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy did a skillful job on “Slumdog,” eliminating characters, simplifying events, constructing the romance, and setting a ticking clock for the last act. There is, however, one change that involves more than streamlining. The novel’s protagonist is named Ram Mohammad Thomas because he is an orphan raised by a Catholic priest named Thomas in a religiously mixed community of Hindus (Ram) and Muslims (Mohammad), a personification of religious toleration appropriate to anyone with hope for India. The film changes this, with Ram, now Jamal, and his friend Salim now brothers in parallel lives, a trope of Indian gangster films, but both Muslim victims of Hindu mob violence, no less than the murder of their mother. As Jamal captains the triumphant main plot of the quiz show and romance, Salim works the parallel gangster/success subplot until its end in renunciation, when aspiring gangster Salim explodes against his false compatriots. Reminiscent of the classic film gangster’s moment of tragic recognition, the martyred Salim, now bathed in cash (millions?), goes out declaring “God is great.”

In Boyle’s flashy, fragmented, rhythmic style this renders an aspect of the film’s resolution a jihadi music video. Why would these “post-imperialist” Western filmmakers give this film such an Islamist twist? Perhaps it is just the same savvy recognition of their young audience that leads A-list Hollywood types to wear keffiyeh scarves as markers of hip transgressive style.

Perhaps it’s akin to what Michael J. Totten has called the “Orientalism of fools,” maybe even an expression of a suicidal self-loathing, an endgame for Western radicalism, which has been an attitude of the leftist cultural elite for some time.

Sorry that I can’t cry over Roger Friedman’s firing as a columnist from FOXNews.com.

It’s not just that he ignored the age-old advice–don’t blank where you live/eat/work.  And it’s not just that as an entertainment industry writer, he was an uber-liberal who rarely wrote anything of interest and mostly gushed over the vapid celebs he covered.

It’s that left-wing politics dominated his absurd praise of left-wing propaganda on the silver screen and his apologism for extremist Muslims in showbiz.

It’s that he sometimes fancied himself a movie critic and lent the FOX News name to extreme fawning over movies like Michael Moore’s pro-socialized medicine flick, “Sicko,” and Angelina Jolie’s “A Mighty Heart,” which was “Mighty” only in its pandering to Islam and pretending some other force cut up Daniel Pearl like so many chicken parts at the market.  Then, other liberal celebs and gals on “The View” would say, “Well, even FOX News like it.”

And it’s that Friedman took it upon himself to question the U.S. government’s decision to turn away Yusuf Islam a/k/a Cat Stevens because of his open hatred of Jews (including, presumably, Roger Friedman), support of HAMAS, his recent past as a HAMAS money-mule, and his defense of the Salman Rushdie death fatwah.  Friedman cheered on the absurd reversal of that wise decision to deny Stevens entry into the U.S.

Does that sound like “Fair & Balanced” to you . . . or liberal and what you’d expect on ABC and MSNBC?

It was extremely stupid to brag on your own company’s website that you are stealing from your company and enjoying the crime.  But Roger Friedman’s dismissal from FOXNEWS.com was loooooong overdue.

In another notable understatement (considering that the Islamist foothold in England is so great that it gave rise to the expression “Londonistan”), BBC arts correspondent Lawrence Pollard said recently that the Rushdie controversy galvanized “a stronger sense of Muslim identity in Britain.”  Nothing like having a blasphemer to behead to bring some people together, I guess.  “Until that time there had been assumed support for the broad principle of free speech,” Pollard adds.  “The Rushdie affair introduced the question of how far free expression should be limited to avoid offending religious feelings in a multicultural society.”

No, it introduced the question of how far expression should be limited to avoid the hysterical, worldwide, lethal mob violence of Muslims, since no one in the media, especially the BBC, gives a second thought to offending the religious feelings of Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, animists, Satanists and especially Christians, because none of those groups will kill you for it.  Indeed, taking pop culture potshots at Christianity is such a common pastime for the Western media that Christians can barely even muster the energy for an angry e-mail or two.

To name just two examples: An episode of Cold Case in late 2007 depicted a group of devout Christian teens in an abstinence club (don’t feel bad, I didn’t know such things exist either, but I want to know where I can sign up my future teenagers), who stoned a girl to death for breaking her vow.  In a 2008 episode of the BBC’s Bonekickers, a Christian extremist beheads a Muslim.

Christians committing stonings and beheadings?  The reason such perversions of reality can be aired is that the entertainment industry knows that any horror, no matter how ludicrously false and offensive, can be attributed to Christians without fear of retribution, and that no horror, no matter how demonstrably true, can be attributed to some Muslims without incurring a fatwa and violating the Prime Directive of multiculturalism, which holds that all cultures must be equally valued and respected – except Western culture, which is inherently evil, racist, imperialist, exploitative. . . et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as Yul Brynner might say.

(Let me stop right here and insert the standard, ubiquitous disclaimer that the majority of the world’s Muslims, especially in America, are themselves offended by and reject such pre-medieval horrors.  This would seem to be so obvious that it doesn’t need stating, but apparently it does, because any criticism of Islamist behavior is immediately met with loud protestations that not all Muslims are terrorists.  Of course they aren’t; what reasonable person ever said they were?  And while I’m at it, let me deal with the other kneejerk objection that always arises in discussions of these matters: “What about the Crusades?  Christianity’s just as bad!”  The blindingly obvious answer is, that was 800 years ago.  Christianity’s moved on, fundamentalist Islam hasn’t.)

Speaking of moving on, how far we haven’t come in those 20 years since the Rushdie affair.  Last week Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders (about whom documentarian Michael Wilson has written more on Big Hollywood here) was refused entry into England, the epicenter of European Islamic extremism, because his short film Fitna, which graphically links violence carried out in the name of Islam to the inciting proclamations of radical Muslim clerics, is denounced by some as “hate speech.”  That’s right – it’s okay in Europe for Islamists to spew the foulest incitements to bigotry, hatred, murder and mayhem, and then act them out, but it’s unacceptable to point out that they’re doing it.

Wilders, whose name is invariably preceded in media reports by the dismissive label “right-wing” (media-code for “a racist crank who is not to be taken seriously and who deserves a good beheading”) has replaced Rushdie as the newest (last year it was the brilliant Mark Steyn) and most visible lightning rod of the assault on free speech currently being waged by Islamists.  Groups like the fifty-seven member nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference are pushing hard to make such “Islamophobia” as Wilders’ film an international crime.  Indeed, the OIC condemns Islamophobia as “the worst form of terrorism.”  No doubt the Rabbi and his pregnant wife, who were horrifically tortured and murdered by rampaging jihadists in the recent Mumbai attacks, would beg to differ if they could.

But back to Christianophobia and the double standard in the media.  Recently I saw a repeat episode of Family Guy in which God was depicted farting the universe into existence.  If Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane had depicted Allah at all, much less expelling gas, he would now be living as Geert Wilders has for years, under 24-hour security to avoid being butchered by a self-righteous fanatic, as was his former countryman, controversial film director Theo van Gogh.  But MacFarlane knows he has nothing to fear from, say, right-wing Christian evangelicals, despite the fact that liberals consider them a more dangerous and imminent threat to America than al Qaeda.

Only the religion of global warming environmentalism enjoys as much freedom from media criticism as radical Islam – and strangely, global warming too is considered a more terrifying threat.  I have news for Al Gore and his devotees: when we’re all living under sharia law, global warming will be the least of our problems.

As for Islamophobia, an “irrational fear of Islam” does not even exist; it is a trumped-up charge designed to bully us into silence and deflect criticism from the Islamists as they go about plotting terrorism and trying to shoehorn sharia law into our culture.  A perfectly rational concern about the demonstrable threat of Islamic extremism does exist, however; that’s what Geert Wilders’ film expresses, and that’s what the Western media must be willing to throw a spotlight on.  The media and entertainment industry has had plenty of practice offending Christian religious sensibilities; it must now take the lead in pushing back against our Islamist enemies who are free speech’s most serious threat.

I’m not holding my breath.