Adieu Voltaire
“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Some wag suggested that Voltaire was murdered the other day in Paris. If this is true, then surely it was a mercy killing. Men like Voltaire and Daumier would be out of place in Francois Hollande’s Fifth Republic anyway. Euro- socialism and traditional Gallic chauvinism are now complicated by Anti-Semitism and Islamophilia. Jews seem to be holding their own as pariahs, but the French romance with Mecca and Muslims is starting to break bad. A dozen or more body bags will do that.
To distinguish between a Jew and a Muslim in France, and in Europe at large, is to separate a culture of life from a cult of death. Jews are ever a model of tolerance, achievement, and assimilation, and at the same time true victims of bigotry in every sense of the word. Muslims, for the most part, are neither tolerant nor assimilated. Yet, somehow the Jew is still ostracized and the Muslim plays the victim, even in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack.
Muslim sensitivities everywhere are now more important than truth or justice anywhere.
Alas, none of this has much to do with justice or morality anyway. France and many other naïve Europeans have surrendered pride and identity to Brussels and in turn volunteered to be colonized by a 5th column of Arab/Muslim religious imperialists.
It’s hard to calculate the price of cheap labor when the real currency is common sense, identity, or culture. The Arab no-go slums that surround Paris are testimony to French venality, the blowback from communal Europe, and all those associated social or economic fantasies.
With assimilation off the table, open borders become the open wounds of cultural decay. Urban necrosis in Paris and London, and many other European capitals, is a self-inflicted wound.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo slaughter, a British Sunni Imam in London crowed on the Fox Network that the key to Muslim rage was sharia, that arbitrary amalgam of contrived history, false prophets, and social toxins. Imam Anjem Choudary’s suggestion to “submit” was nonetheless superfluous. European and American journalists have been on their knees since oil was fifty cents a gallon.
Starting with Daniel Pearl, and continuing with the recent spate of beheadings by ISIS, we see video after video of journalists on their knees literally pleading for their sorry apologetic lives, denouncing their homelands, and then being butchered anyway. Journalists are a special obsession for Islam because professional writers are now the iconic representatives of cowering democracies. No group has done more to rationalize and sanitize the barbarity that is Islamic imperialism.
You would think that Islamists would embrace their Media co-conspirators in Europe and America; Arab “spring” propagandists and Palestine pimps for example.
Au contraire! For the devout, the apostate must be put to the sword before the infidel. Apologists and traitors are reviled by both sides.
Fear is the dominant ethic of modern journalism; fear to mock Mohamed or the Koran, fear to document the clear links between atrocity and religious dogma, fear to publish the graphic evidence of beheadings, fear to expose slavery, abuse of children, and rampant misogyny, fear to offend Arab dictators, fear to offend ayatollahs and imams, and now the fear to publish the very satire that precipitated the death of real heroes. American and European editors also fear that things might get worse, a dread that now has all the earmarks of inevitability.
An amateur video about prophetic pedophilia was used to justify the slaughter in Benghazi and now provocative cartoons are used to justify the carnage in Paris. “Piss Christ” is rationalized as high art in New York City but any mockery of Mohamed’s yen for little girls is regarded as justifiable capital blasphemy.
Yes, the Charlie Hebdo journalists were rare exceptions in a trade where timidity is the norm and candor is a vice. Any offense, real or imagined, is the real peril for modern journalists, the tar baby of political correctness. Truth is now any pablum that pacifies gutless editors and their clueless readers.
The feigned indignation, mock shock, and hypocrisy of private and public Media outlets over the latest outrage is mind boggling. There’s nothing new or startling about the bloodbath in Paris or the carnage that is sure to follow. Pander precedents are now legendary: the bloody trail from Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo is now a well-travelled venue of liberal, artistic, and literary shame.
The Associated Press, Washington Post, or NY Times are no more likely to publish the evidence for which their French colleagues died then they are to refuse to wear head scarfs in Dh?r. The BBC, American PBS, and the Fox Network are not likely to show any satiric cartoons about Islam either. The Charlie Hebdo raid, like the 9/11 attack, is thus another win for the prophet’s vanguard, another nail in the coffin of civility.
In a Media culture where there seems to be no bottom, CNN might be the worst. The Jane Fonda network used a day of “mourning” followed by a Sunday “unity” day rally to market the “moderate” Muslim majority myth ad nauseam. Islamist shills like Christiane Amanpour and Fareed Zakaria trotted out the usual tired, asserted conclusions about what most Muslims believe. Putting a Shia American and Sunni American on point to cover another Islamic atrocity is probably just a another happy coincidence for cooked books.
The apathetic Muslim majority are guiltless today in the same sense that the majority of French Parisians were guiltless in the Holocaust during WW II.
The West is now impaled on the horns of the dot.com dilemma: on the one hand governments and internet industries who exercise no restraint in collecting information; and on the other hand analysis, public and private, which ignores or twists facts for fear of offending the guilty.
Small wonder then, that the humiliation of democracies like France, England, and America is now a blood sport for the Ummah. The official response in America is prophylactic self-censorship. The Associated Press (AP) and the Obama White House have revised the official and public rhetoric of politics to eliminate words like Islamism – as if there were no links between deviance and devotion.
François Hollande, a metrosexual in the Chirac mold, called for a moment of silence the day after the latest Muslim blitzkrieg. That moment of prayer in Paris, however, was no tribute to slain journalists or freedom of the press.
Where timidity is a value and courage a vacuum, “silence” is the perfect word to capture European and American cowardice. Silence is the preferred response to jihad, Islamism, and Islamo-fascism. Alas, silence is acceptance and silence is submission. And ultimately, silence is the sickly sweet sound of surrender.
France also sponsored a day of “unity” on Sunday, 11 January, unity against Islamic terror. At least 40 world leaders and millions of ordinary Frenchmen marched. Even Benjamin Natanyahu came from Tel Aviv. Washington was absent. No senior politician from the Barack Obama regime attended the “leadership” gathering.
The unity march in Paris was a gathering of world leaders, statesmen and citizens who marched to oppose Islamic terrorism. Mister Obama and his national security team do not qualify on either count. With no leadership and no strategy on the terrorism issue, their sympathies, by default, lay with Islamic reputation not French victims.
Obama and Biden were probably watching football on 11 January in silence. AWOL on Benghazi and now AWOL in Paris, team Obama continues to be “under achievers and proud of it.” The Obama regime will go down in history as an example of how democracies are capable of voting for failure.
Europe is not “Charlie.” America is afraid too. Both are weak. Voltaire and Charbonnier are now a pas de deux, both rolling in their graves. La Belle France, and America are starting to look like museums for ideas.
“It may seem pompous, but I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.”
– Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier
1967-2015
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G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of national security.