The “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” was yesterday, May 20.
In the words of Jean Luc- Picard,
“We’ve made too many compromises already, too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther!”
Picard goes on to say that he will make the Borg pay, but that is not what I want. Rather, I want to stand and defend free speech. No religion (Islam included) is above question, criticism, critique, or examination. People the world over need to be reminded that the freedom of speech most certainly includes the freedom to offend.
However, the position of the Muslim community, even moderates, seems to be that Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you. In the words of Sam Harris at the Huffington Post (Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks)
Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.
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Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often called “a chilling effect” on our exercise of free speech.
To paraphrase another writer (Mark Goldblatt’s post titled The Poet Versus the Prophet), we (and our Representatives in Government and Media) have failed. We are not walking the walk of our forebears, that gave us the freedoms we take for granted. We have failed to put ourselves on the line in order to defend the principles of free thought and free expression. Not just Christian principles, but the ideas of freedom of expression and belief, of tolerance — the very principles that are at the heart of the difference between the Judeo-Christian West and Islam.
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