Comedy Central’s Cowardice

The latest victim in the continuing war against free speech, is the somewhat vulgar cartoon show South Park, which professes to have no respect for any institution when it comes to satire and comedy.

Unless, of course, it is Muslim.

Fearless Comedy Central, which runs South Park, bleeped out a segment that originally had the Prophet Mohammed disguised as a teddy bear, and changed him to Santa Claus, and censored a portion dedicated to free speech and fear of intimidation.

I’ve not seen that show, which sounds neither funny nor offensive. But a New York group calling itself Revolution Muslim (which is said to comprise a dozen people who hate Israel) warned that if Mohammed wasn’t removed from the show, its producers would wind up murdered like Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in 2004.

Van Gogh’s body had a knife plunged in the chest with a note saying that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, then a member of the Dutch Parliament, would be next for a documentary arguing that Islam encouraged violence towards women. (Hirsi Ali now lives protected in the U.S.).

The creators of the South Park segment, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are upset that their show fell victim to intimidation, especially when South Park has satirized the Catholic Church, Buddhists, Scientologists, without flinching, yet caved shamelessly to threats from this puny group of New York pamphleteers.

There is no courage left in the so-called “free” world when it comes to Islam.

Since Muslim jihadists have no compunction against killing either infidels or other Muslims, we in developed countries succumb to their intimidation with the alacrity of the Road Runner in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

The media is mostly to blame for this surrender to intimidation.  We justify it by calling it principle, when really it is cowardice.

It all started with those Danish cartoons in 2005 that were political comment using Mohammed. Riots around the world left people dead – riots provoked by people who had never seen the supposedly offensive cartoons.

At the time, no newspaper in North America dared publish the cartoons for fear of reprisals that would include murder. We, the media, justified this surrender by calling it a matter of “principle” not to offend. Cowardice disguised as principle.

The now-defunct Western Standard eventually published the cartoons. Publisher Ezra Levant was charged with a hate crime by human rights commissars who are Canada’s greatest enemies of free speech. Levant won, but his magazine folded.

All around the world there is fear of Muslim extremism. Hamburger joints won’t advertise pork for fear of Islamic retaliation; soft ice cream with a twirl that is said to resemble the Arabic word for Allah is apologized for and changed; museums remove images of Mohammed from Arabic displays for fear of offending. (If you want to see a hair from the beard of the Prophet, go to Topkapi Palace museum in Istanbul where, if memory serves, they also have a finger bone of Mohammed).

John Stewart, icon to his fans, joked about the South Park back-down, but he couldn’t disguise the basic cowardice that overlaps on his own show, which purports to be fearless but also caves to militant threats.

Free speech and choice distinguishes freedom. It is one of the things our soldiers in Afghanistan risk their lives for, but which we at home abandon at the first threat. Pity.