Free Speech, Mohammed, and South Park

Fodder for another episode, of course. But a part of an ongoing worldwide pattern, as the people behind this--warning? Threat?--make abundantly clear with the images of Theo Van Gogh, taken shortly after he was attacked in a street for making this video with Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Anderson Cooper features the "warning":

Cooper called the threats against the South Park creators “chilling,” and drew a clear line between finding the oft-crude humor of South Park unpleasant or finding it an affront to humanity:

“We live in a country which prides itself on its freedom of speech, in which we can say whatever is in our hearts, in our minds, as long as it’s not threatening to someone else– as long as it’s not calling for violence against somebody else. Now, you might not like South Park the cartoon, you might think it’s offensive, you might decide it’s not something you want to watch– that’s up to you. But the notion that some radical Islamic group in America would make a threat, even a veiled one, against two men’s lives because of it is chilling. And for the people making this threat, that is precisely the point– to chill discussion, to chill debate.”

On the broader "free speech regarding jihad" front, Mark Steyn comments on the limited utility of mocking jihadists:

Kathy Shaidle, a peerless mocker, has a terrific response to the Demos thesis. She divides the target audience into two: On the one hand, jihadists and their sympathizers are unlikely to be susceptible to this pitch because to be hot for jihad in the first place makes one almost by definition a humorless plonker. On the other, there's a long and honorable tradition of using ridicule as a morale-booster for your own side.

Except that "our" side has pretty much internalized the Ayatollah Khomeini's ruling that "there are no jokes in Islam". The Danish cartoonists attempted some very mild satire and as a result now live in hiding. The only publisher in Canada willing to report on the cartoon story without kowtowing to the Islamic bullies wound up with a six-figure legal bill. A Vancouver courtroom under the eminent jurist Commissar Heather MacNaughton, Jokefinder-General of British Columbia, devoted the best part of the day to examining "expert witness" Khurrum Awan about the "tone" of my jokes. John Miller, Professor of Ovine Fornication at Ryerson University, sought intervenor status in the case for the purpose of supporting a statutory penalty preventing me from ever again being published in Canada, because of a line of satirical mockery. Only the other day Ann Coulter made a camel joke and gave the Dominion's multiculti spinsters a fit of the vapors - and Fatima Al Dhaher, the young lady who was "traumatized" by the camel joke, became the new pin-up gal for a hate-free Canada even though she's a member of a group that wants every last "subhuman" "Zionazi" "kikeroach" removed from the Middle East.

In essence, PC enforcers like the wretched Allan Rock (see below) have gone a long way toward criminalizing ridicule and mockery. Given that a lot of comedy is mere pandering, most "satirists" understand that when you wander on to this terrain you're lining yourself up for far more trouble than it's worth. Better to stick to mocking those dumbass fundamentalist Christianists, right? When they're waiting for you outside the stage door, it's with a placard not a death sentence.

And Kathy's right, too - that the jihadists shrug off jokes as a sign of western decadence, or at any rate an inability to understand what's at stake.