Freedom of expression forces cartoonist to go ghost
While the politically correct world has been huffing and puffing about the right of a slumlord to build a shadowy financed community center and/or mosque up close to the site of the World Trade Center, moaning about mythical Islamophobia, they have been totally silent about the real threats by Muslims against those who dare practice their First Amendment rights.
You know - those boring ones of freedom of speech, freedom of expression. Call it oh...freedomphobia by Muslims against those infidels who decide to sponsor a draw Muhammad contest.
Molly Norris of Seattle, believing in the First Amendment, did so in response to the death threats against fellow South Park cartoonists who mocked Islam and television executives if their station, again bravely practicing the First Amendment, aired the segment. Her reward? Death threats forcing her to "go ghost."
As Eileen F. Topliansky wrote in late July
Unbelievably, she has now been named to an execution list on Inspire, a new online English language al-Qaeda magazine. It is a publication that attempts to recruit American Muslims for jihad.Morris and eight other cartoonists, authors and journalists from Sweden, Holland and Great Britain have been targeted for "their blasphemous caricatures" (snip)
American-Yemeni Islamic cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi has made the dictates known and death is the answer. This is the same al-Aulaqi linked to the Christmas Day bombing earlier this year!
Incidentally, al-Aulaqi is also linked to New York's Times Square almost bombing; the one which the city's mayor initially attributed to a tea partier angry at Obamacare.
American laws, thankfully, guarantee the right to free expression and writer Kathleen Parker urges Americans not to be "cowed by Muslim objections to cartoons." She writes that "to that end, and in support of Norris and others, 19 Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists have signed a petition condemning threats and attacks against cartoonists. The petition is posted on the Cartoonists Rights Network International Web site (http://cartoonistrights.com). It hasn't nearly enough signatures."
Alas these rights are meaningless against targeted Muslim death threats. Therefore, at the insistence of the FBI, to save her life Norris has disappeared--"gone ghost."
As Mark Feeley of the Seattle Weekly explained:
You may have noticed that Molly Norris' comic is not in the paper this week. That's because there is no more Molly.
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. It's all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" cartoon.
And not a word--or demonstration--from Mayor Bloomberg, President Barack Obama (D), the pro mosque, freedom of expression protesters and other practioners insisting Islam is a "religion of peace".
Oh, what not a surprise!