By BI: The New York Times’ hypocrisy regarding displays of “offensive” religious imagery runs unabated. An article yesterday about the sale of Chris Ofili’s controversial painting showing the Virgin Mary clotted with elephant dung against a porn-collage background, was accompanied by a photo (below) of the offensive work.
Newsbusters Yet when the paper refused to reprint a cartoon of Muhammad that appeared in the Paris satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that resulted in the January 2015 massacre of 12 magazine staffers, it offered this smug, cowardly justification:
Under Times standards, we do not normally publish images or other material deliberately intended to offend religious sensibilities. After careful consideration, Times editors decided that describing the cartoons in question would give readers sufficient information to understand today’s story.
No fear of violent reprisal, but fear of “causing offense.” So why does Ofili’s dung-clotted Virgin Mary get a pass?
As noted before, the Times isn’t afraid to run all religiously offensive images. The paper has in the past run approving pictures of Ofili’s painting, which caused controversy when it hung in the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. On Friday, ignoring its previous self-righteous comments on not offending “religious sensibilities” when it comes to Muhammad, the Times once again ran a photo of the Virgin Mary.
At Shoebat, Muslim ‘religious sensibilities’ will never stop us from exercising our First Amendment rights.
Daniel Greenfield is one of my all time favorite journalists, this is a spot on article by Daniel, and watch the video at the end of the article as well.
When the Polk Awards decided to honor the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, one obvious name came to mind. Gary Trudeau.
Gary Trudeau
If there is one man who represents the opposite of what the Charlie cartoonists did, it’s Trudeau. They took risks, Trudeau takes none. They lived knowing that they could be killed at any moment. There is no person on earth who would bother killing Gary Trudeau even if it was Kill Gary Trudeau Day.
Trudeau is that paradoxical creature, the establishment cartoonist, the party satirist, the hack who dares to say exactly what he is expected to say. Imagine NPR in a few black and white sketches. That’s Trudeau’s Doonesbury. Republicans are bad. Liberals are good. And then insert a topical reference.
The Polk Awards were the best forum for Trudeau. George Polk invented heroic wartime exploits that got him a job at CBS. Unlike Brian Williams, Polk did serve, but he was not a fighter pilot, he serviced aircraft. In Greece, his dubious reporting attacking Truman and the Greek government was defended by his lefty colleagues by inventing even more imaginary heroics that he had never claimed for himself.
By the time they were done, Polk had singlehandedly defeated the Japanese.
After Polk was murdered by Greek Communists, American lefties went all out to prove that there had been a conspiracy by the Greek government to silence him. All it took to believe in the Polk Conspiracy was a willingness to disregard the entire history of Communist activities and how casually its armed bands, agents and guerrillas killed people across the entire political spectrum for minor offenses.
But these revelations have not in any way interfered with the Polk Awards. And the Polk Awards decided to make Gary Trudeau the first cartoonist honored with an award. Trudeau would join a seminar on “Dangerous Lines: Cartoonists and Other Subversives” featuring such dangerous subversives as a writer for The Onion and Obama sycophant Jules Feiffer. It was a seminar so dangerously and outrageously subversive it could have been held at Whole Foods.
Trudeau reciprocated by blasting the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists as free speech absolutists and bigots. He claimed that the cartoons of Mohammed did not “challenge authority” and argued that “Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful.”
While the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had challenged the authority of a system of theocracy over a thousand years old, Trudeau’s latest cartoon mocks people stockpiling gasoline.
Trudeau’s rant, published in The Atlantic as “The Abuse of Satire”, claims that Charlie had pandered to the Jews while offending Muslims, described Muslims arrested for supporting the attacks as having exercised their freedom of speech, and contended that by, “attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech”.
Supporting killing cartoonists for drawing Mohammed is free speech. Drawing Mohammed is hate speech.
That’s certainly a subversive idea, but it subverts such things as Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion. It subverts the idea that a cartoonist shouldn’t be killed for challenging a theocracy.
But then what else can an establishment hack denied an administration he can oppose, subvert? When the establishment of the left is in charge, the only things left to subvert are the barriers to the absolute rule of the left.
Dangerous subversives become the destroyers of democracy fighting against free speech absolutists. The dangerous subversive stops dangerously subverting and instead lectures on the appropriate uses of satire. He becomes a commissar who censors with one hand and cartoons with the other.
Real satire exists to challenge the sorts of people who would set out appropriate uses of it. State satire isn’t satire. Soviet cartoonists in Krokodil churning out incessant cartoons of capitalists in top hats being thumped by Communists weren’t satirists. Like Trudeau, they were establishment hacks pimping out propaganda.
Their work was usually more talented than Trudeau’s, but it was just the establishment talking to itself.
The left has adopted “Punching up” and “Punching down” as the legitimate metrics for comedy and satire, but real ‘Punching down’ comes from the establishment. When an establishment satirist like Trudeau attacks satirists who risked their lives challenging a real authority with the power to kill them, what he is really saying is that satire should only serve the ends and agendas of the establishment.
That is the very definition of “Punching down”. When the establishment tells you what satire is supposed to be, then anyone following those rules is punching down.
The entire rhetoric of “Punching up” and “Punching down” limits comedy to a crude Marxist structural pyramid. The left “Punches up” by building alliances with “disenfranchised” groups in order to rule. It then uses them as shields to punch down. Establishment hacks like Trudeau do not refrain from “Punching down” by mocking ordinary Americans who lack their wealth and access to power. They claim that by doing so they’re really punching up on behalf of their disenfranchised shields.
But the model collapses altogether when we consider a segment of the population that believes that everyone must submit to its religion and is willing to back up that demand with lethal force.
Muslims are by no means Trudeau’s “powerless, disenfranchised minority”, but suppose they were. There was a time when the followers of Adolf Hitler were powerless and disenfranchised. Power is not just about the guy who wins an election. It’s also about his shadow who is willing to kill to take over.
Mocking him takes a lot of guts.
It takes no guts to throw another few barbs at Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry for the entertainment of your lefty audience. Not only won’t their followers kill you, but they can’t even disinvite you to any of the better establishment parties. Mocking them is actually a ticket into the cocktail party circuit. It’s as subversive as Mark Russell tinkling away on the piano.
We have a lot of “Punching up” satire in America which is as toothless as that tinkling. We have few satirists willing to mock Obama because that is a ticket out of every single cocktail party ever.
Saturday Night Live could mock every president, but it drew the line at Obama. It occasionally builds jokes around him, but it doesn’t draw an exaggerated ridiculous caricature of him the way that it did of Clinton and Bush. We’ve seen a drunken lecherous Bill Clinton. We’ve seen a drunken numbskull Bush.
There’s been nothing like that on the show for Obama. There can’t be. It would be too dangerous.
There is in fact an easy way to tell whether your satire is really punching up or down. Try it and see what happens. If you run into a gigantic backlash that impacts your career and your safety, then you’re actually punching up. Just ask a rodeo clown out of Missouri who went out wearing an Obama mask and ended having to go into hiding while the Governor, a Senator and the Kansas City Star called for his head. Bans were issued, blacklists were assembled and Obama fans threatened to burn down his house.
That’s what real “Punching up” looks like. Real punching up might mock establishment journalistic awards named after the world’s greatest fake fighter pilot not named Brian Williams.
To comedy cowards like Gary Trudeau that would be the reprehensible antics of free speech fanatics who don’t know that there’s good satire and abuse of satire. They don’t understand that there are jokes that you’re supposed to tell and jokes that you never should. They might draw Mohammed, and then in response to the outrage, draw him again and again.
What do you do with people like that? You shoot them. And when they’re dead, you smear them. Because if you don’t, their courage exposes you for the cowardly hack that you really are.
That’s what real establishment satirists do. Just ask the old dead Soviet cartoonists of Krokodil.
Don’t miss Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield on The Glazov Gang discuss The Real Meaning of ‘Allahu Akbar’.
From the JERUSALEM POST by NACHMAN SELTZER 04/13/2015 23:23
The city of lights on the edge of the River Seine has become a hotbed of Islamic terrorism that is manifested in oh-so-many- ways. Paris presidential residence . (photo credit:REUTERS)
When I told my friends that I was being sent to Paris on assignment, I saw a certain look crossing every face. How should I put this delicately? They were afraid.
“Are you sure it’s safe,” they wanted to know.
“Yes,” I replied. “I’m going from the airport to the convention center and back to the airport.”
“Okay,” they said, somewhat mollified.
“As long as it’s safe.”
Welcome to Paris 2015.
The city of lights on the edge of the River Seine has become a hotbed of Islamic terrorism that is manifested in oh-so-many- ways. The Jews of France no longer feel welcome in the world capital of fashion and good food.
This was not my first visit to magical Paris. I was there in 2010. At the time, I felt safe enough to stroll through the streets with a kippa on my head, to ride the Metro, to visit the Eiffel Tower and to even take a boat ride on the Seine. Unfortunately, the illusion of security exists no more.
As a child recently asked his mother upon catching sight of an obviously Jewish man walking through a hostile Parisian arrondissement – “what’s he doing here Mommy? Doesn’t he know that he will be killed?” Welcome to Paris 2015.
Matters came to a head recently with the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, followed by the shocking attack and subsequent day-long siege on the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in which four Jews were senselessly murdered. It seemed like Europe was standing poised on the cusp of disaster. And then more than three million people took to the streets in a spontaneous display of outrage.
Suddenly everyone was Charlie.
Yet, though the outrage was properly displayed when it came to fighting for freedom of speech, one couldn’t claim the same regarding the terrorist attack on Paris’ Jews. Everyone might have been Charlie, but it was equally as obvious that not everyone identified with the Jews of France.
It is against this frightening backdrop that the Jews of Paris recently gathered to celebrate Torah learning and all it represents in their lives.
Welcome to Paris 2015.
Paris appears the same. The same graceful architecture of buildings, roads and boulevards steeped in culture, the same museums and landmarks, the same corner cafes serving tiny cups of coffee to passerby, the same River Seine winding through the city.
On the surface, everything seems fine.
Les Docks de Paris is a convention center somewhat akin to the Javits Center in New York or the fairgrounds in Tel Aviv. Used for auto shows, large business events and conventions hosting thousands, Le Docks de Paris was recently utilized for an entirely different purpose, as the Jews of Paris gathered to reaffirm their very essence.
Under the aegis of Rabbi Dovid Hofstedter, the Dirshu organization has succeeded in creating an unstoppable force of Torah renaissance around the globe with hundreds of thousands of Jews taking part in one or another of a wide range of daily Torah programs offered. While in Paris, I participated in the celebration of the completion of Dirshu’s signature seven-year Daf HaYomi B’Halacha, Mishnah Berurah – Jewish law study program. The sense of excitement was palpable as the keynote speakers of the Orthodox Jewish world stood up to address the crowd. There was a sense of great achievement and an underlying promise for continuance. You were able to feel it in the room, in the very atmosphere. The people in attendance were clearly growth oriented and serious about life.
But there was an additional, somewhat intangible feeling coursing through Les Docks de Paris.
A sense of pride in who they are – a sense of ethics and morality – a sense of being surrounded by the finest of French Jews – and a sense of pride in their ability to live life as Torah-observant Jews in a time of such uncertainty.
The crowd was excited by what they have accomplished over seven years of daily learning, while ambitiously contemplating future Torah study. They stood united against the background of the worrisome political situation and the growing danger in the streets. They expressed indignation when Charlie Hebdo was attacked and cried for their brethren when four fellow Jews were laid to rest – murdered on the Sabbath eve for the crime of being Jews. And now they gathered to express their belief in God and their readiness to study His laws.
They were eager, jubilant and filled with a sense of mission.
I heard many words and messages. Powerful speeches and touching stories. And as I looked around Les Docks de Paris, I knew that the message I heard that evening would resound within my heart for days to come, as I recall a convention center in Paris filled with Jews proudly proclaiming their belief in God and their readiness to stand up for what they know to be true.
The gathering was poignant, authentic, genuine and emotional, its message triumphant.
“Je suis Dirshu.”
“Je suis proud Jews of France.”
And perhaps most importantly “Je suis Torah.”
Welcome to Paris 2015 – where the battle is being fought with graceful perseverance, a link to eternity and a refusal to surrender.
The writer is a rabbi and the author of 20 books, runs a boys’ choir based out of Jerusalem, writes a regular column for the Hamodia International Magazine and lectures around the world. He can be reached at nachmanseltzer@ gmail.com.
My comments in red: It has been over 20 years now that the Simon Wiesenthal Center has been warning Jews to not travel to France. As famous journalist Oriana Fallaci stated, “Europe has become Eurabia.”
Cathy
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