The Undocumented Mark Steyn (48 page)

               
Nobody asked you to cook up “Everybody Draw Mohammed” Day. You chose to do that—and, if you didn’t understand what you were getting into, then where have you been the last nine years? Kurt Westergaard, who’s 74, could have bailed after 48 hours and whined that it’s all getting way more attention than he ever expected and drawn a picture of himself in a peace-sign T-shirt. But he didn’t.

               
That’s why we’re all down on you. You took a bad situation and made it worse. You announced that at last there was a liberal progressive who was going to stand up to Islamic intimidation—and then you caved, in nothing flat. And even then I could have forgiven
you, if it weren’t for the final self-humiliating
coup de grâce
of your crappy peace-sign T-shirt. I’d love to have glimpsed the stage of the creative process at which you thought that would be just the ticket. Good luck betting your future on that clapped out obsolescent talisman.

I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now
The Seattle Weekly
informs us:

         
You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week. That’s because there is no more Molly.

On the advice of the FBI, she’s been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’s own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of
The Seattle Weekly
can say? As James Taranto notes in
The Wall Street Journal
, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:

         
Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

Who knows? But listen to what President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and
The Seattle Weekly
are telling us about where we’re headed. It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threaten it, we reward them by
capitulating. Indeed, Obama & Co. are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to
threaten
to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ “bad cop.” Ooh, no, I wouldn’t say that if I were you, because my friend here is a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up, because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.

While I was in Denmark, one of the usual Islamobozos lit up prematurely in a Copenhagen hotel. Not mine, I’m happy to say. He wound up burning only himself, but his targets were my comrades at the newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
. I wouldn’t want to upset Justice Breyer by yelling “Fire!” over a smoldering jihadist, but one day even these idiots will get lucky. I didn’t like the Danish Security Police presence at the Copenhagen conference, but I understood why they were necessary. No one should lose his name, his home, his life, his liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won’t be there for you.

Four years later, there was not much left of “Everybody Draw Mohammed” Day, but there was even less of Molly Norris. As the website Blogwrath put it:

         
Because of the Muslim death threats, Molly Norris, who started the event, had to go into hiding and change her name. She disappeared completely and nobody knows whether she is dead or alive
.

Salman Rushdie was, with hindsight, fortunate in his timing. Had he written
The Satanic Verses
twenty years later, no one would have published it. But, even if someone had, far fewer liberals (if any) would have spoken up on his behalf
.

And so it is that an American citizen has vanished from the face of the earth because she made a joke about Islam
.

Hello, Molly?

THE UNSAFE SPACE

The Spectator
, April 19, 2014

THESE DAYS
,
PRETTY MUCH
every story is really the same story:

          
•
    
In Galway, at the National University of Ireland, a speaker who attempts to argue against the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) program against Israel is shouted down with cries of “F**king Zionist, f**king pricks. . . . Get the f**k off our campus.”

          
•
    
In California, Mozilla’s chief executive is forced to resign because he once made a political donation in support of the pre-revisionist definition of marriage.

          
•
    
At Westminster, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declares that the BBC should seek “special clearance” before it interviews climate sceptics, such as fringe wacko extremists like former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson.

          
•
    
In Massachusetts, Brandeis University withdraws its offer of an honorary degree to a black feminist atheist human rights campaigner from Somalia.

          
•
    
In London, a multitude of liberal journalists and artists responsible for everything from
Monty Python
to
Downton Abbey
sign an open letter in favor of the first state restraints on the British press in three and a quarter centuries.

          
•
    
And in Canberra the government is planning to repeal Section 18C
¹
—whoa, don’t worry, not all of it, just three or four adjectives; or maybe only two, or whatever it’s down to by now, after what Gay Alcorn in the Melbourne
Age
described as the ongoing debate about “where to strike the balance between free speech in a democracy and protection against racial abuse in a multicultural society.”

I heard a lot of that kind of talk during my battles with the Canadian “human rights” commissions a few years ago: of course, we all believe in free speech, but it’s a question of how you “strike the balance,” where you “draw the line” . . . which all sounds terribly reasonable and Canadian, and apparently Australian, too. But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.

But I don’t really think that many people these days are genuinely interested in “striking the balance”; they’ve drawn the line, and they’re increasingly unashamed about which side of it they stand. What all the above stories have in common, whether nominally about Israel, gay marriage, climate change, Islam, or even freedom of the press, is that one side has cheerfully swapped that apocryphal Voltaire quote about disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it for the pithier Ring Lardner line: “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”

A generation ago, progressive opinion at least felt obliged to pay lip service to the Voltaire shtick. These days, nobody’s asking you to defend yourself to the death: a mildly supportive retweet would do. But even that’s further than most of those in the academy, the arts, the media are prepared to go. As Erin
Ching, a student at sixty-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper after being affronted by a visit to campus of a (stand well back) Christian conservative: “What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.” Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity.

The examples above are ever-shrinking Dantean circles of Tolerance: At Galway, the dissenting opinion was silenced by snarling thugs baying four-letter words. At Mozilla, the chairwoman is far more housetrained: she issued a nice press release all about (per Miss Alcorn) striking a balance between freedom of speech and “equality,” and how the best way to “support” a “culture” of “diversity” and “inclusiveness” is by firing anyone who dissents from the mandatory groupthink. At the House of Commons they’re moving to the next stage: in an “inclusive culture” ever more comfortable with narrower bounds of public discourse, it seems entirely natural for dissenting voices to require state permission—“special clearance”—to speak.

At Brandeis University, we are learning the hierarchy of the new multiculti caste system. In theory, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. If conservative white males were to silence a secular women’s rights campaigner from Somalia, it would be proof of the Republican Party’s “war on women,” or the encroaching Christian fundamentalist theocracy, or just plain old Andrew Boltian
²
racism breaking free of its redoubt at the Melbourne
Herald Sun
to rampage as far as the eye can see. But when the sniveling white male who purports to be President of Brandeis (one Frederick Lawrence) does it out of deference to Islam, Miss Hirsi Ali’s blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly news anchor. White feminist Germaine Greer can speak at Brandeis because, in one of the more whimsical ideological evolutions even by dear old Germaine’s standards, Ms. Greer feels that clitoridectomies add to the rich tapestry of “cultural
identity”: “One man’s beautification is another man’s mutilation,” as she puts it. But black feminist Hirsi Ali, who was on the receiving end of “one man’s mutilation” and lives under death threats because she was boorish enough to complain about it, is too “hateful” to be permitted to speak. In the internal contradictions of multiculturalism, Islam trumps all: race, gender, secularism, everything. So, in the interests of multiculti sensitivity, pampered upper-middle-class trusty-fundy children of entitlement are pronouncing a Somali refugee beyond the pale and signing up to Islamic strictures on the role of women.

That’s another reason why Gay Alcorn’s fretting over “striking the balance” is so irrelevant. No matter where you strike it, the last unread nonagenarian white supremacist Xeroxing flyers in a shack off the Tanami Track will be way over the line, while, say, Sheikh Sharif Hussein’s lively sermon to an enthusiastic crowd at the Islamic Da’wah Centre of South Australia, calling on Allah to kill every last Buddhist and Hindu, will be safely inside it. One man’s decapitation is another man’s cultural validation, as Germaine would say.

Ms. Greer has reached that Circle of Tolerance wherein the turkeys line up to volunteer for an early Eid. The Leveson Inquiry declaration of support signed by all those London luvvies like Emma Thompson, Tom Stoppard, Maggie Smith, Bob Geldof, and Ian McKellen is the stage that comes after that House of Commons Science and Technology Committee—when the most creative spirits in our society all suddenly say: “Ooh, yes, please, state regulation, bring it on!” Many of the eminent thespians who signed this letter started their careers in an era when every play performed in the West End had to be approved by the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain. Presented with a script that contained three “f**ks” and an explicit reference to anal sex, he’d inform the producer that he would be permitted two “crikeys” and a hint of heavy petting. In 1968, he lost his censorship powers, and the previously banned
Hair
, of all anodyne trifles, could finally be seen on the London stage: this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Only four and a half decades after the censor’s departure, British liberals are panting for the reimposition of censorship under a new “Royal Charter.”

This is the aging of the dawn of Aquarius: new blasphemy laws for progressive pieties. In
The New Statesman
, Sarah Ditum seemed befuddled that the “No Platform” movement—a vigorous effort to deny public platforms to the British National Party and the English Defence League—has mysteriously advanced from silencing “violent fascists” to silencing all kinds of other people, like a
Guardian
feminist who ventured some insufficiently affirming observations about trans-women and is now unfit for polite society. But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it’s hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it’s easier to close it down?