In PJ Media this morning I discuss the increasingly obvious overall motive of the Muhammad movie riots: to force the West into discarding the freedom of speech.
Muslims in twenty-one countries demonstrated against a YouTube movie
about Muhammad Friday. Adding to the death toll that began with
Ambassador Chris Stevens and his associates in Libya, three people were
killed as Islamic supremacists stormed the U.S. embassy in Tunisia, and one was killed in Lebanon
as Muslims marched from a mosque, stoned police, and set fire to a KFC
restaurant, apparently as a symbol of the hated United States. The
savage and random murders were all in service of an overarching goal: to
intimidate the United States into abandoning the freedom of speech. And
worst of all, Barack Obama seems willing.Islamic leaders worldwide called for an end to the freedom of speech.
Dr. Ahmed el-Tayyeb, the grand imam of the most prestigious and
influential institution in Sunni Islam, Al-Azhar in Cairo, on Saturday asked
the secretary general of the United Nations to pass a UN resolution
that would “prohibit insulting symbols and sanctities of Islam by some
fools and misguided, who do not know the value of social peace among
peoples and agitate seditions among them.” Tayyeb called for
“criminalizing insulting symbols of Islam and other religions” and
“punishing those who committed such heinous acts and insulted Prophet
Muhammad of Islam,” although he didn’t specify what punishments he had
in mind.Meanwhile, Arab News reported
that Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia,
“called on the international community to criminalize acts of abusing
great prophets and messengers such as Abraham, Moses, Jesus and
Muhammad.”The Muslim Brotherhood said
that “hurting the feelings of one and a half billion Muslims cannot be
tolerated, and the people’s anger and fury for their faith is invariably
predictable, often unstoppable,” and declared that “assaults on the
sanctities of all heavenly religions” should be rendered illegal.Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the secretary general of the Organization of
Islamic Conference (OIC), the 57-government Muslim body that has been
pushing for years now at the United Nations for restrictions on the
freedom of speech, was in I-told-you-so mode, saying
that the violence “demonstrated serious repercussions of abuse of
freedom of expression that OIC had consistently been warning against.”In response to all this, Barack Obama did not reaffirm the importance
of the freedom of speech. He did not explain that it is the right to
say things that are unwelcome and unpopular that safeguards Western
societies against authoritarianism and tyranny. He did not say that in
pluralistic societies, we all have to put up with speech that we dislike
without resorting to censorship or violence.Instead, he appeared eager to give the Islamic supremacists exactly what they wanted. He pressed Google,
which had previously announced that the offending film about Muhammad
fell within its guidelines and thus would not be removed from YouTube,
to review its guidelines and remove it after all. Google, to its immense
credit, refused. And he had the alleged filmmaker, a Coptic Christian
named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, arrested
on a parole violation for posting the film, since the terms of his
parole included staying away from the Internet. Nakoula has been
released, but could still be charged and imprisoned.