Tom Blumer:
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the ugliness Pamela Geller has exposed, and how grateful we should be to her.
Geller’s “Muhammad Art Exhibit & Contest” in Garland, Texas, on May 3, sponsored by her American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Jihad Watch, featured “about 350 entries depicting Muhammad” — in drawings and cartoons.
For this — creating drawings and cartoons — radical Islamists have declared that she and others associated with the event must die.
After numerous online and other Islamist death threats during the preceding week, two ISIS-inspired jihadists drove 1,000 miles from Phoenix to Garland’s Curtis Culwell Center hoping to carry out the demanded executions. Fortunately, thanks to a heroic police officer’s aggressive action, they were killed before they could carry out their plan.
As will be seen shortly, it is no exaggeration to say that long-established organizations in the international “human rights” community opposed the exercise of free speech embodied in that event, and believe that its sponsors and attendees deserve to be punished.
Elite U.S. reactions to Geller’s and her attendees’ near-death experience demonstrate just how far their campaign against so-called “hate speech” has progressed. The answer is, “farther than almost anyone might have thought.”
A much greater than expected swath of elite commentators and pundits on both the left and right clearly believes that Geller and event organizers — again, by exhibiting drawings and cartoons — provoked the attack. Many of them believe the event was an example of “hate speech,” and that it should not have taken place. Some have gone further, declaring that it should not have been allowed to take place. Those who truly believe in freedom should be thanking Pamela Geller for helping us identify genuine enemies who until now have cloaked themselves in respectability.
Sadly, the surface desirability of eliminating “hate,” especially in speech, is powerful.
After all, the great religions of the world – with the notable exception of certain far from minor strains of Islam — treat genuine hate as sinful. In Catholicism, hatred “(targeted) directly at the person … is always sinful.” Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu, is credited with saying “Hate the sin, love the sinner.”
This nation’s Founders were religious too — and uncommonly brilliant. As they declared this nation’s independence from Great Britain, they, uniquely in human history, also declared that human beings’ rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were God-given and not conferred by men or their governments. The Founders’ First Amendment-confirmed definition of “liberty” clearly includes the right to say, write, draw, or produce whatever one wishes. Given the intensity of political discourse at the time, it’s clear that they did not intend to carve out any kind of exception for “hate.”