I’m sick of this.
There was yet another Islamic terrorist attack, this time against a satirical magazine in France. Twelve people dead because they believed in free speech.
First off, let’s keep the people of France in our prayers. I know a lot of French people now. They’re good people. They don’t deserve this. Nobody deserves this.
Second, to the moral equivalence crowd, and their inevitable cries about how everybody is all equally the same, and Christians and Jews have done bad things too, and their fears about the inevitable backlash against Muslims that never materializes because the west aren’t barbarians… To you people, to the smug, self-righteous leftists, go to hell.
Just like everybody else, I got up this morning and checked the internet. I read the reports. Those pissed me off, but they aren’t shocking at this point. Islamic terrorists saw people’s heads off, blow up buildings, busses, trains, marathons, shoot up hospitals, shoot up schools, kidnap hundreds of girls to rape them and sell them as sex slaves, on and on and on. They do this often in countries where they can operate with impunity, and they do it occasionally in the west when they can get away with it.
This particular attack hit the west, and it was galling because it struck directly at one of our sacred values, free speech, the ability to speak out against whatever we are feel compelled to speak against. So of course, the apologist cowards in western media started blurring out pictures of the offending cartoons.
It is asinine. Islamic terrorists recently massacred a school. A whole school. Hundreds of kids. Hell, hundreds of Muslim kids, but that didn’t get hardly any attention in the western media. Instead, a fabricated story about some woman in a head scarf getting shamed by racist Australians got more coverage. A lie about how the west might be surly in the wake of hostages being murdered got more coverage than actual evil.
Because of my job I follow a lot of authors, artists, and creative types, so I noticed something this morning. Many of them were compelled to say something about the events in France, but most of them wouldn’t say anything about who did this horrible thing. They talked about tragedy, and violence, and shootings, and terror, but very few would come out and say anything about the actual bad guys. Anybody who did mention the actual bad guys had to put in the obligatory Most Muslims are Peaceful disclaimer and then walk on eggshells to avoid being slandered as hatemongers by their followers who are members of the Goodthink Police.
I felt like writing something here. But then I felt this momentary pang of dread. What if my words make somebody angry? What if I upset them? And that’s when it hit me, every single public figure, every person with an audience, felt that same doubt. That same little bit of fear that evil Islamic lunatics would take offense and kill them. No matter how unlikely or irrational, they felt it.
And that is exactly what evil wants.
I saw a cartoonist friend of mine post about this, and it struck me that he said this made him doubt humanity, it made him doubt his species. He’s a good man. He was emotional because these were his peers murdered this time. I told him that it wasn’t most humans. It was one particular group of humans. And that group’s goal is to make people like him afraid to speak. They want authors, artists, speakers, preachers, politicians, journalists, everyone afraid to name them, afraid to talk about them, afraid to question them, afraid to point out the obvious.
One of the fundamental tenet of western civilization is our ability to speak freely. Anything that stops free speech is evil, but with these evil men, throw that complaint on the pile. It is just another atrocity among many. But this post isn’t about them. The only way to deal with terrorists is to destroy them. For most of us, that is out of our hands. For that reason I sincerely hope GIGN spends the next few days fruitfully tracking down and shooting everybody involved.
This post is about us, the regular people. The people they want to scare. Every time one of us doesn’t write or say what we want, we give in. When newspapers blur out the “offensive” cartoons while simultaneously running self-righteous op-eds about free speech, we give them exactly what they want.
Public figures are worried about men in balaclavas blowing up their house for talking. Regular folks are worried about the social justice crowd slandering them as racist hatemongering bigots for talking. Either way, people aren’t talking, and that’s stupid. The “religion of peace” needs to get its house in order. Do you really believe that is going to happen while the only people who can speak freely are militant imams and everybody else is cowed?
