America chooses hypocrisy in order not to upset Muslims
martedì 5 maggio 2015 English 0 commenti
Il Giornale, May 05, 2015The current trend in the US is now about smoothing out the edges, letting things go, allowing people to confront extreme Islamism and the terrorist attacks themselves with a sad, but not hostile, shaking of the head. In the meanwhile, an Islamic attack is being called a “religiously motivated attack” – any religion – and, in the very country that suffered the 9/11 attacks, the outbreaks of violence are now being called random, accidental, isolated cases, just like Obama labeled the bloodbath in Charlie Hebdo’s offices and in the Hypercosher supermarket in Paris. After all, Obama did not join all the other heads of state in the march against terrorism. And the American newspapers did not publish Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons: both the CNN and the New York Times followed the president’s way: do not upset Islam, do not publish those cartoons, and – God forbid – do not give rise to suspicion of Islamophobia.
Even if those poor twelve people killed in the French newspaper’s offices were victims of an attack motivated by Islamist hatred, Obama remained true to his program. Starting his first mandate, he announced that he would change the relationship between the US and Islam, which he has always ritually defined “a religion of peace”, even when the attacks were proving to be undoubtedly prepared and studied in the name of jihad, like the one in Boston or the one in which an officer killed four other soldiers in Baghdad in 2009. And now the Dallas attack, to which the police responded “American-style”, killing the two men who had attacked a Muhammad cartoon contest in Dallas, marks another important step in making clear that the “American Freedom Defense Initiative” – the association that organized the contest - is considered outside the country’s mainstream thought for its being not politically correct enough. For this reason, when the organization booked the Curtis Culwell Center, it had to pay ten thousand dollars out of its own pockets for security, as the president, the “iron lady” Pamela Geller, pointed out. Her organization and her blog support the fight against Islamic extremism. Geller had also invited Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician famous for his fight against what he considers an outright aggression to the Western world.
The District Council decided that Geller should pay out of her own pockets for security, judging the contest as inflammatory. This is possible, but the content of the event was perfectly American in its being a vigorous statement of freedom of expression. It is widely known that there is never a problem when the Saints, or even Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary are derided. It becomes a problem when Muhammad is brought into play and rivers of blood start running, as it happened with the Jyllands Posten in 2005, and as it is currently happening in Paris. The Garland District refused to defend Pamela Geller’s event as a normal fact of free speech, as the freedom of expression should be confined to the outside of the Islamic fence. But the most striking example was the Pen prize for courage awarded during a gala on May 5, with the participation of the major representatives of the literary community.
The prize has been awarded to Charlie Hebdo, a reasonable choice for anyone who believes in freedom of expression, even if those cartoons may disappoint some tastes. Actually, not everyone liked all those priests, Muslims and Rabbis pictured as monsters, but was it really important there? On the contrary, as is known, six important writers – with famous ones among them, as Francine Prose or Taiye Selasi - announced their withdrawal from the gala award. They explained their choice with sometimes-absurd remarks, and Prose compared Charlie Hebdo to Goebbels. Fortunately, and thanks to his courage, the American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, author of the graphic-novel “Maus” on the story of the Holocaust, accepted, with five others, to replace the upstanding absentees. Also Salman Rushdie and Paul Auster joined him against the fanatical course of Islam that is trying to scare us all. Fanatical ok, but random too, please.