Washington D.C. Metro surrenders to potential Assassin’s Veto
U.S. News (Steven Nelson) reports:
The mass transit authority that oversees commuter buses and trains in the nation’s capital is banning issue-oriented ads for the remainder of the year after receiving an ad proposal featuring a cartoon of Muhammad, Islam’s central figure.
[…]
It’s hard to characterize this, I think, as speech derogatory of Muslims in general as people (though such speech would be constitutionally protected, and in my view couldn’t be restricted through viewpoint-based rules banning such derogatory expression). It is rather criticism of a particular belief, the belief that no one is allowed to draw Muhammad, on pain of punishment by the sword. Indeed, it is prescient criticism, given the juxtaposition of the ad and the metro system’s response to it. As artistic statements go, this one is spot-on.
The reason for restricting it, then — even by totally rejecting all issue-oriented ads, in an attempt to make the restriction viewpoint-neutral — seems likely to be either a general condemnation of blasphemy, or a specific fear that speech that offends extremist Muslims is too dangerous for American transport agencies to display. And indeed, this is what “Former D.C. Council member Jim Graham, who served 12 years as a member of the Metro system’s board of directors and twice as its chairman” told the U.S. News:
Graham says he instinctively supports people’s freedom to advertise controversial messages, recalling his fight to place HIV awareness ads in the D.C. system in the early days of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s.
But he says current board members are “obviously in a bind because we know what happens when you criticize Muhammad, we know how some people react to that. I don’t think we ever had a situation [in the past] where someone threatened to blow up a bus.”
Graham says he’s not aware of any credible threat in response to the ad, but that, “We know worldwide what has happened to others who have gone down this path.”
The Washington Post story (Paul Duggan) likewise reports:
“My view is, you put that ad up on the side of a bus, you turn that bus into a terrorism target,” a top Metro official said Thursday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the agency anticipates being sued over the ban. “I think it’s a very bad outcome for everybody. But it’s a risk we don’t want to put our passengers under.” …
“I think there’s a potential threat and a danger if we were to accept that ad,” Metro board member Michael Goldman said. “Better to be safe than sorry.”
Yep, just keep feeding that crocodile, guys.
Some old white guy said some something about trading essential liberty
“. . . instinctively . . . “
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
This seems apropos:
William Kilpatrick How to Alienate Moderate Muslims
Gosh, we sure wouldn’t want to ask for trouble, would we?
Sounds like Christians and Mormons need to learn the lesson being put forth here, too. People will continue to insult their beliefs until some mass shootings or beheadings start occurring. And when the inevitable outcry begins, point to statements like the one made by Mssrs Graham and Duggan above, et alia.
Anyone want to set an over-under on how many it would take before the dichotomy gets resolved? (I’m actually expecting it to be resolved by banning artistic expression of religion entirely, rather than opening up speech for all.)
Christian beheads jihadist in Syria revenge killing: monitor
Drumwaster, fortunately the bible takes a different tack than the Koran. The difference between civilized and barbaric, if you will.
Unfortunatly, human nature is easily influenced by Lucifer, and WWIII is begun cuz our leaders, along with most of the worlds population, including too many of our fellow citizens, place no value on the virtues of civilization when juxtipositioned against raw power.
@LB.
Quite so. It’s the difference between shaking the dust off your sandals and letting God deal with it versus cutting someone’s head off because your God isn’t powerful enough to take care of himself.
As for giving Muslims offense, where does it end. A cursory glance at a map shows innumerable geographic locations named for Christian saints, including many named for Crusaders. Crosses are prominently displayed at churches and parochial schools. Indeed, I count variations of the word “Crusader” as a mascot of around ten schools within fifty miles of me. The fact of the matter is, Christian existence gives Muslims offense. The Progressive Left does not care because it is not Christian and views Christian belief as no more significant than messing around with model trains. To them, it’s not worth dying for and they have the misbegotten belief that they’ll be spared and continue to exercise power in some post-dhimmi world.
Good luck with that.
Drumwaster, fortunately the bible takes a different tack than the Koran. The difference between civilized and barbaric, if you will.
But the barbarians are the ones who get treated with kid gloves, rather than being treated like the uncivilized scumbags they are. When you have official decision-making bodies announcing that the barbarians are being given the heckler’s veto over the rights and freedoms of the civilized, then something is SERIOUSLY wrong, and it is time for people to either stand up and make the barbarians grow the f*ck up, or else start to react using the same heckler’s veto.
Rules are for everyone, or they are for no one.
By the way, maybe it’s just a typo, but you capitalized “Koran”, but not “Bible”. I’m offended. I think I’ll go out and kill a few Muslims and put it on YouTube so that people won’t make that kind of hate speech error in the future. It seems to have worked well for Muslims so far.
As for giving Muslims offense, where does it end
Precisely. Drawing Mohammed offends them to lethal violence, but so does being Jewish. Or Coptic Christian. Or American. Or enjoying some ice cream. Or buying a particular brand of tires. Or a (false) rumor that someone has been less than utterly respectful to the Koran (while they use the Bible for toilet paper or fire kindling). Or any number of other things.
Meanwhile, the Piss Christ and Elephant Dung Virgin Mary were unavailable for comment.
Islamic State demolishes Christian church in Syria
and people who go on about bullying wouldn’t recognize a real danger if it shived them in the dining room. When I was kid, I worried about the guys with criminal records not the a-hole who liked to call you a “faggot” who you later suspected had his own “issues”.
The dynamics here are similar to the conspiracy guy, an easy to understand theory that gives a simple explanation to a complex issue. Stop provoking them and it will all go away. Frankly I do not give a rat’s ass at their motivation is, I want to live and live by my rules, not theirs.
>I know from thousands of personal experiences how the mere circumstance of having signed Charter 77 has immediately created a deeper and more open relationship and evoked sudden and powerful feelings of genuine community among people who were all but strangers before. This kind of thing happens only rarely, if at all, even among people who have worked together for long periods in some apathetic official structure. It is as though the mere awareness and acceptance of a common task and a shared experience were enough to transform people and the climate of their lives, as though it gave their public work a more human dimension than is seldom found elsewhere.
Perhaps all this is only the consequence of a common threat. Perhaps the moment the threat ends or eases, the mood it helped create will begin to dissipate as well. (The aim of those who threaten us, however, is precisely the opposite. Again and again, one is shocked by the energy they devote to contaminating, in various despicable ways, all the human relationships inside the threatened community.)
Yet even if that were so, it would change nothing in the question I have posed.
We do not know the way out of the marasmus of the world, and it would be an expression of unforgivable pride were we to see the little we do as a fundamental solution, or were we to present ourselves, our community, and our solutions to vital problems as the only thing worth doing.
Even so, I think that given all these preceding thoughts on post-totalitarian conditions, and given the circumstances and the inner constitution of the developing efforts to defend human beings and their identity in such conditions, the questions I have posed are appropriate. If nothing else, they are an invitation to reflect concretely on our own experience and to give some thought to whether certain elements of that experience do not—without our really being aware of it—point somewhere further, beyond their apparent limits, and whether right here, in our everyday lives, certain challenges are not already encoded, quietly waiting for the moment when they will be read and grasped.
For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?
October 1978<
@havel power of…..
I’ll be damned, I didn’t capitalize bible or Koran, must have been auto-spell.
Yep, did it again. Funny that…
By the way, there is a third option for what is seriously wrong. Could start shooting the official decision making bodies betraying their own people.
Just saying…
Much as I hate to credit ace with anything, I think he made some good points the other day when he ripped Vermont’s dirtiest old man a new one:
The Left, of course, will never abide by any agreements reached, so it’s best to never make any.
The problem Ernst, is in order to do that, we would have to be unscrupulous, nasty, and borderline insane to carry it out. I mean, what are we going to do? Start rioting and burn down OUR neighborhoods? Start lying, cheating and stealing? Subvert the constitution and resort to any means to accomplish our ends?
Sounds like a way to win some battles but lose the war.
What I had in mind when I hit the post button, which I hit too fast (you’ll notice I forgot the link) is that we ought to pound the crap out of ISIS for what they’ve done to the Christian communities in the Middle East. The idea being, if they can’t live in peace with their neighbors, then they’re not going to live (i.e. treat them like they’re treating their neighbors).
I think Lee has made some important points, and it is something I’ve fretted over (the whole Sauron’s Ring of Power analogy that I and others have used here from time to time).
Anyways, the way forward, it seems to me is to insist on free spreech, regardless of whose ox is being gored, so as to prevent the decent of all to the level of the perpetually offended assplodeydope type.
Maybe what we need to do is declare that while we really don’t want to repeat the Japanese-American internment experiment with Muslim-Americans we will do just that if that’s what it takes to teach Muslims to live and let live.
Or maybe we need to encourage a culture of hyper-vigilance on all forms of public transport, and not just airplanes.
What’s clear is that we have an Alinsky Rule game going on here: hold people accountable to their own standards. So Christians are expected to turn the other cheek when some asshole provacatuer drops a crucifix in urine and calls it “art,” while no “reasonable” person wants to offend devout Muslims because that’s when heads get sawed off. The end result of that is that either the standards change, or we all start saving for the jizya.
Or maybe the best alternative is to wash your hands of the whole sorry mess and trust in God. But that’s hard, because I have kids whom love and whom I want to watch grow up and live productive meaningful lives in uninteresting times.
And that I guess leads us right back to Golda Maier (sp?) and the problem of people who hate other people’s kids more than they love their own children.
Let’s not provoke them so when they start killing us for no reason, we can die with a clear conscience.
(sp.) Meir. She married a guy named Meyerson and that name got transliterated (hebraicized) to Meir.
It’s a strange thing — speaking literally about the title of this post — to criticize Muhammad, if we understand Muhammad as the fiction it (he) is. It’s almost necessary to enter into the world Muhammad the fiction supposedly gave his followers, or, as the fiction claims within the fiction, his deity gave him. All of which (to my way of thinking) is a poetic or made-up bit of business — if yet a deadly serious business — of conquest and rule. However that works out, we end up “criticizing” something made up in turn by writers who lived two-hundred years or more after their character is supposed to have died, which writer worked from ‘stories’ they had heard, such that our criticism is going to be — inevitably, it seems to me — more about those later writers than about the cipher about which they wrote.
Wait, are you saying Mo didn’t write the koran?
One of the chief objections was that events of this type will alienate moderate Muslims and possibly drive them into the radical camp.
This Mormon will still defend the right of Parker&Stone and all our other lovely critics to hate our guts to their hearts’ content.
The fact that there’s often a festival in Salt Lake to mock the LDS subculture doesn’t change my willingness to defend those mockers from any and all tyrants.
Alienation my pasty white posterior. Either you’re on board with the PRINCIPLES of liberty or you’re not. The fact that other people use their free speech to say awful things about me and mine doesn’t alienate me from the cause of free speech.
It shouldn’t alienate Muslims, either. If it does, screw ’em.
Wait, are you saying Mo didn’t write the koran?
Mo was illiterate. That’s one of the “proofs” of the Quran’s divine origin: how could an illiterate dude come up with this?
I was up until 3:30 this morning going around and around with some really spectacular idiots. Here’s a 1000W bulb from my own faith who’s been well-trained to be a special snowflake.
In other news, Yes, Nick Searcy vs. Mark Lamont Hill and Montel Williams.
This is a better link for the Searcy/Williams spat.
the “winning cartoon” is lame
Homeland Security Adviser Mohamed Elibiary Goes on Hate-Filled Anti-Christian Rant, Attacks Jindal as ‘Bottom Feeder’
>the “winning cartoon” is lame<
the "winning cartoon" ain't gay
you know what else isn’t gay?
janet yellen’s zirpydoodle pie
oh noes
Weird, all 3 Dem candidates keep talking about how things have gotten worse over past seven years. This seems newsworthy.
>janet yellen’s zirpydoodle pie<
"little debbies" for moi. je suis debbie!!11!!