Mark Steyn on Molly Norris and the loss of the First Amendment

When someone destroys a Bible, U.S. government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys Bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.

. . .

On the advice of the FBI, she’s [Molly Norris] been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’ own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:

Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

Who knows? Given his highly selective enthusiasms, you can hardly blame a third of Americans for figuring their president must be Muslim. In a way, that’s the least pathetic explanation: The alternative is that he’s just a craven squish. Which is odd considering he is, supposedly, the most powerful man in the world.

Read entire column here.

~~~ooOoo~~~

The non-liberal press, i.e. Mark Steyn (NJR), James Taranto (WSJ) and Diana West seem to be the only journalists questioning this double standard in our society and speaking out on this atrocity visited on Molly Norris.

Liberals or not, thank God, someone is.

The ghost of Molly Norris

My blood is boiling. Tonight I read a farewell editorial in the Seattle newspaper to their cartoonist who has been forced into hiding.  This is a tepid and pathetic goodbye statement to a woman who lived in a nation where freedom of speech used to be sacred. Molly Norris was the cartoonist who declared a “Everyone draw Mohammad Day.”

The ghost of Molly Norris

The gifted artist is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program—except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab.

My question is: why have none of  her liberal media colleagues spoken out about this? No one in the media has shown an iota of outrage at the fate of one of their own. But they are quick to tell us all that Islam is a religion of peace and we have to be tolerant and accepting of their traditions and religious constraints, even at the expense of our own freedoms.

When an American citizen is forced into hiding because a fatwa has been called by some Islamic cleric on the other side of the planet and all because she exercised her once protected freedom of speech, we are now living under a de facto form of Sharia, ourselves. It’s time we admitted this.

“We understand the absolute seriousness of a threat from an Al Qaeda inspired magazine and are attempting to do everything in our power to assist the individuals on that list to effectively protect themselves and change their behavior to make themselves less of a target,” David Gomez, the FBI’s assistant special agent in charge of counter-terrorism in Seattle, told the News.

We have to change our behavior to make ourselves “less of a target.” Is this not acquiescing to Sharia? If it’s not then I’m a Chinese astronaut.

Who among us is brave enough to put a crucifix in a jar of urine and apply for a federal grant to do so? In America and all Western nations, it takes no bravery to do this. Christians are the butt of every joke and the target of every obscenity because Christians don’t fight back. Christians are non-violent and those who act in the name of God in violent ways, are not Christians; they are criminals and they face justice in our courts. But Islamists are and must be violent because the Koran tells them to behave so. And if we call them out for what they are and for what they are doing, we are intolerant and Islamophobes. Even while they are smothering our God-given freedoms, we must sit by and hold our tongues.

Or worse yet, we are forced to change our identities, leave our families and “go ghost.” Who wants to end up like Theo Van Gogh or Daniel Pearl?

We’re hoping the religious bigots go into full and immediate remission, and we wish her the best.

I guess Molly can take solace in knowing that her colleagues “wish her the best” because that’s the best she is going to get from her liberal media friends and from the government that is supposed to protect our freedoms.

From me, and I hope somehow Molly knows,  I send outrage and prayers for an existence that has to be like a form of evil purgatory.