RS
FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR
An Opportunity To Appease
Now that a hapless, and moderately untalented, filmmaker has been rousted out his bed a something after 1am and taken by a half dozen or so sheriff’s deputies to an “interview” with his parole officer, the Obama administration has another neat-o opportunity to appease Islamic Rage Boy and his confreres.
The “spiritual leader” of Lebanese Hezbollah has called for an international law preventing Islamic butthurt.
In a move that could escalate tensions around the Arab world, the leader of the Hezbollah militant group called for protests against the movie and said the U.S. must be held accountable for the film.
In a televised speech, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah pushed for the creation of an international law that would ban insults of Islam and other religions, citing similar laws that exist to prevent anti-Semitism.
One hardly knows where to start with this. Most of the practitioners of Islam as it is practiced in the wild, not the sensitive and gentle Religion of Peace version we were introduced to circa 2001, specialize in the slaughter of the adherents to non-Islamic religions. Were Nasrallah serious he could take a huge first step by advocating freedom of worship and freedom of religion in the Arab world.
Of course that isn’t the issue. Nasrallah knows his man. Obama is distrustful of American power and American culture and will not take any meaningful step to use the first or defend the latter.
Oddly enough, former British Prime Minister actually gets the issue correct on a couple of levels.
Mr Blair, now Middle East envoy for the Quartet of powers, said: ‘The film, it may be wrong and offensive but it is also laughable as a piece of film-making.
‘What I am afraid is very dangerous and actually is wrong is the reaction to it.’
He is correct.
What is wrong in reaction to this film, to the extent it is actually a problem, is the contrived outrage and riots in the Arab world.
What is dangerous about this reaction it the way this administration has contrived to use this non-issue as a way to seek to severely circumscribe speech permissible under the First Amendment. From their failure to defend American values in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to the disavowing of the speech of a private citizen, to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calling a Florida pastor to get him to moderate his speech, this administration had declared a basic American freedom off limits.
Lest you think I am being overly dramatic, consider this:
The Obama administration’s Department of Justice official Thomas Perez, who is the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, refuses to say that his department won’t attempt to criminalize blasphemy in the future.
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