So there I am in my Adler on Line studio listening to an expert on terrorism telling me that publishing the Muhammad cartoons is the equivalent of publishing cartoons mocking the Holocaust.
What matters is not what you believe, Mr. Adler, I am told. What matters, he says, is what they believe.
Does it get any more pathetic for western civilization? I didn’t know that the massacre of millions of people was a belief. I thought it was fact based.
I thought that what separated us from the uncivilized was that we had a system of law based on values that have been mutually accepted by reasonable people. I thought that reason was based on the logical marshalling of facts. I thought that facts had to represent reality. I thought that if reason and reality got a divorce, nobody’s freedom could remain safe.
I thought that the Cold War was fought in the name of protecting the free mind which was under attack by the Communist mind. I thought that the war against Communist tyranny was about keeping us free. I thought that a person’s yearning to be free was innate and that a free society was one where the tyrants of statism and religiosity were to be kept at bay with constitutions and the laws that must obey them.
What is a cartoon? Have you ever watched The Simpsons and asked yourself the question: Why is it that laughter has, for a few moments at least, conquered me? We could analyze the joke or simply admit to ourselves that what the cartoon is lampooning is making us free to laugh at it.
Most of the time we end up laughing at our own foibles and our own conventional nonsense. Cartoons liberate us from the chains of bigotry. They are celebrations of personal freedom.
I personally believe that freedom is the cradle of our civilization. That cradle gets rocked every day by authoritarians of all stripes who view our friend, freedom, as their foe. But I personally believe that when the cradle rockers are exposed for what they are, we will fight back.
I personally believe that we don’t wish to become prisoners of our own fearful minds.
I personally believe that we don’t want freedom to sit on death row, and then to lethally inject it with the poison of intolerance.
We have been told by moderate voices that the publishing of the Muhammad cartoons shows disrespect to those of the Islamic faith. I buy that and I have no desire to publish the cartoons on my website.
Some people are telling me I am a coward not to publish them. But I am not going to give the mob the power over my mind. I am not going to publish them simply to spite those who threaten and murder.
Nothing is gained in deliberately disrespecting someone else’s treasured icons. But everything is lost when we lose our minds and pretend there is moral equivalence between the mockery of murder and that of an icon.
When the Taliban destroyed Buddhist statues, they were engaging in disgusting acts. But when they executed women in that soccer stadium they were committing evil acts.
As a free man I am not willing to declare that there is no difference between what is disgusting and what is evil.
If the cartoons in question were mocking the massacre of Muslims, they would earn the condemnation that they have received.
But if we as a free people choose to murder our own minds and diminish evil in the name of tolerance, we are putting ourselves in a position where we no longer have anything left to lose. We have surrendered everything that mattered.
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