Guest post by Lindsay Perigo
Savage superstitionists have just slaughtered eight journalists in Paris for the crime of making fun of their paedophile prophet. Had these sub-excreta been around in Voltaire's day, Voltaire's day no doubt would have been brutally shortened. The free-thinking French philosopher wrote of the murderous Mohammed:
But that a camel-merchant should stir up insurrection in his village; that in league with some miserable followers he persuades them that he talks with the angel Gabriel; that he boasts of having been carried to heaven, where he received in part this unintelligible book, each page of which makes common sense shudder; that, to pay homage to this book, he delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse, at least if he was not born a Turk, or if superstition has not extinguished all natural light in him.
It was Voltaire who also noted that "they who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities." Haven't we seen that statement vindicated time and time again?!
In 2015, Voltaire's philosophical antipode, apart from Islam, is the Political Correctness and cultural relativism in whose name people make excuses for Islam.
According to the PC theologians, there's a thing called "Islamism" which is somehow different from Islam. According to PC theology, "Islamists" who butcher other people are justified in doing so because they've been "offended" at some point. President Obama made that excuse to minimise the enormity of, and deflect blame for, the killing by Libyan superstitionists of America's ambassador in Benghazi in 2012: it was a "crude and disgusting anti-Muslim YouTube video," he said, that made them do it, and the whole world should unite in revulsion against ... not the savages, but the maker of the video! If Obamullah had ever heard Salman Rushdie's admonition, "There is no such thing as the right not to be offended," he was clearly oblivious or hostile to its truth.
In New Zealand, Brown Supremacist Derek Fox, chief spokesman for the Islam-sympathetic Maaaaaaaaaaaahdy separatist movement, has been peddling the same line about the Paris massacre. "The editor of the French magazine has paid the price for his assumption of cultural superiority and arrogance, he was the bully believing he could insult other peoples culture and with impunity and he believed he would be protected in his racism and bigotry by the French state. Well he was wrong, unfortunately in paying the price for his arrogance he took another 11 people with him. Power cultures all like to use the old chestnut of freedom of speech when they choose to ridicule people who aren't exactly like them, and mostly they get away with it." (Mr Fox clearly successfully resisted his colonisers' attempts to show him the proper use of the comma and semi-colon when he was at school. No doubt he regarded those attempts as cultural arrogance.)
Oh well, that's all right then—bomb and behead away, superstitionists everywhere.
Intriguingly, Obama himself is not using the cultural relativism angle this time. He even called the outrage what it was: evil. "This was an attack on journalists, it's an attack on our free press. ... The values that we share with the French people cannot be silenced." Secretary of State Kerry, whose Department in 2009 denounced as "unacceptable" those wickedly admirable Danish cartoons lampooning the Mohammed wretch, called the murdered journalists "martyrs of freedom." Nothing at all about how it's all the fault of those who offended the savages. Has the Anti-American President, who renamed the War on Terror "Overseas Contingency Operation," who referred to an American Muslim's murderous rampage as "a workplace incident," become decent? If so, might we hope his Chamberlainesque apologetics for Islamosavagery will cease?
In the meantime, as we ponder these latest Islamatrocities, perpetrated in the land of Voltaire—he to whom is also attributed the immortal line no primitivist will ever comprehend, "I disagree with what you say but defend to the death your right to say it"—I repair to some words from one of my earlier commentaries on this "stupid, stinking, savage superstition." I resurrect them in the hope they'll be sobering for those who, even after Sydney, complacently imagine it can't happen here:
[Freedom] cannot be defended—indeed, it can only be betrayed—by apologetic weasel-worders appeasing militant, murderous morons whose savage pseudo-sensibilities have been stirred, not by sticks and stones, but by words and cartoons. May men of righteous rationality reignite the flame of reason and fight an unapologetic philosophical jihad in its holy name, that it may illumine the globe and save the world from another Dark Ages. Death to Islam—and all forms of tyranny over the minds of men!
Lindsay Perigo resides bucolically on the Kapiti coast, from whence he rises when roused to slay irrationalism and proclaim fine speech, fine music and the redeeming qualities of fine wine. Or even rotgut.
This post originally appeared at his SOLO website.
[Cartoon by Marian Kamensky]
1 comment:
The (brilliant) article "We are not all Charlie" in The Atlantic correctly notes that many media organisations have cowered before the threat of totalitarian violence. This morning the NZ Herald stands in solidarity with the words "Je suis Charlie" on its front page. But did it print (unedited) the MuḼammad cartoons when Theo van Gogh was slaughtered or during the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy? Will it mock this religion and identify it for what it is - an evil ideology? The mainstream media is not Charlie.
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