Free speech and dog bites

It looks like some people need a refresher course in the concept that going around deliberately offending people you disagree with doesn't make you a hero, it makes you an asshole.

This is my general conclusion about Pamela Geller and the American Freedom Defense Initiative, whose "Draw a Cartoon of Muhammad" event in Garland, Texas was crashed by two armed Muslims.  The event had high security -- no one was in any doubt of the risk they were taking -- so when the two men came in, brandishing assault rifles, they were immediately shot and killed by the armed guards hired to protect attendees.

The comparisons to the Charlie Hebdo massacre started to fly.  Geller, who organized the event, was vocal in her claim that the whole thing had to do with free speech.  "There is a problem in Islam, as illustrated last night, and anyone that addresses it gets attacked in this same way," Geller said.  "The Islamic jihadis are determined to suppress our freedom of speech violently."

Which is certainly true, on some level.  I don't want anyone to misunderstand me; I still think that Islam is factually wrong, and has a lot to answer for in terms of human rights offenses, suppression of women, and encouraging extremism and fanaticism.  But Geller's case began to look a little different when it was revealed that she isn't just a free speech advocate, she's a conspiracy theorist who thinks there's some kind of huge plot to institute Shari'a law in the United States, and that there are Muslims everywhere, influencing every level of government.

Hell, she even thinks that conservative activist Grover Norquist is a "dangerous Islamic infiltrator."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So the whole Draw Muhammad event starts to look like a deliberate set-up, and that Geller was hoping like crazy that something violent would happen.  What she did amounts to taking a stick and repeatedly hitting a dog with it, and when the dog turns around and bites you, saying, "See?  I told you it was vicious."

And, of course, she got her wish.  So this isn't some sort of victory for free speech; it's a fanatic on one side pissing off two fanatics on the other side, which hardly constitutes a win for either ideology.

As far as the parallels to Charlie Hebdo, there are some similarities.  In both cases, we had people who knew full well what the reaction by devout Muslims would be.  The difference, though, seems to be that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo lampooned other religions as well -- the Catholics and Jews got equal time in their magazine -- whereas Geller's event was specifically targeted at Islam.  The fact that the intent in Garland was to provoke a response is evident from the armed guards, who turned the attack into something more like suicide by cop.

So let me make this clear.  We do have the right to free speech in the United States.  Geller, and the cartoonists who participated, had the right to do what they did.  But having a right to do something doesn't mean that you have the right to expect that there be no consequences no matter what you say.  I might have the right to say that a guy I know is an illiterate, ugly ignoramus, but I don't have the right to act all surprised if he responds in kind.

And more importantly, having the right to do something doesn't make it the right thing to do.

As far as Geller's claim that she was just trying to point out how crazy the Islamic extremists are, I only have one question: didn't we already know that?  No one who has picked up a newspaper in the past ten years had any doubt on that point.

There's a difference between criticism and deliberate provocation.  By all means criticize; pointing out the flaws in an ideology is crucial in getting people unstuck from erroneous ways of thinking.  (And as I said before, there is a lot about Islam to criticize.)  But you can do that and remain respectful of people.  It doesn't mean there won't be times people will lash out at you; it doesn't mean you won't sometimes offend.

But it does leave you on a moral high ground that Geller and Charlie Hebdo have abandoned.  They want to have it both ways -- to set out to be offensive, and then to be offended themselves when their targets retaliate.

And in the end, all they proved was that being an asshole sometimes results in getting people killed.

James Foley, and the moral bankruptcy of the conspiracy theorists

Every time I think the conspiracy theorists can sink no lower, they outdo themselves.

Not that it's easy.  These are the people who think that everything from the Sandy Hook massacre to the Boston Marathon bombing were "false flags" to distract us from what the Evil Government is doing, or else outright hoaxes staged by "crisis actors."  They've dogged the footsteps of bereaved parents who have lost children to school shooters, desperate to prove that their child never existed, thereby ranking even lower on the Great Chain of Being than the members of the Westboro Baptist Church (who fall somewhere below slime molds themselves).  They spread their fear messages amongst the gullible, turning jet contrails into toxic "chemtrails," fluoridation of water into a campaign by the government to convert us all into mindless drones, and vaccination programs into a plan by "Big Pharma" to give our children autism, ALS, and lord alone knows what else.

And now they have latched onto the brutal beheading of James Foley by the butchers of ISIS as the latest target of their poisonous nonsense.

The flag of jihad [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

We have the conversation over at the r/conspiracy subreddit claiming that ISIS is an arm of the CIA.  Worse still, from the site Epoch Times comes a claim that the execution video itself is a fake, and that the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is actually an Israeli Jew named Elliott Shimon who is on the payroll of Mossad.  Other claims are floating around various social media, suggesting that Obama operatives staged the execution (or possibly carried it out for real) to distract us from the riots in Ferguson or the illegal alien crisis or the ongoing non-scandal surrounding Benghazi.

(And just for the record: though I provided links to the r/conspiracy thread and the Epoch Times article, I am actively recommending that you don't click them, unless you really enjoy experiencing outrage at near-aneurysm levels.)

But to the people promoting these ridiculous claims, I have only the following to say:

Have you no shame at all?

A man died, for fuck's sake, slaughtered in the desert with less dignity than we accord cattle in an abattoir.  His executioner's blank eyes are the face of true human evil, and the cause he belongs to is representative of the worst human nature can do.  I am by nature and philosophy a pacifist, but reading about Foley's horrifying last moments (I refuse to watch the video, and so should you) makes me roundly in favor of tactical strikes to wipe every last member of ISIS off the face of the earth.  These subhumans deserve no better.

And you dare to bend this story to fit your twisted little view of humanity?  You have only proven your own moral bankruptcy, if there was any doubt of that left.  Your lies are nearly as sickening as the brutal jihadist message of ISIS itself, because you, like they, have no apparent regard for the life and dignity of a human being who (by all accounts) was a kind, courageous, intelligent man whose death should be mourned in peace by his family and friends, not used as a means for bolstering a warped worldview.

It shouldn't surprise me by now.  You people are willing to lie about damn near everything else, why wouldn't I expect you to lie about this?

But it always does, somehow.  I always think, "This, at least, is beneath even the conspiracy theorists."

And I'm always wrong.