Hugh Hewitt, dhimmi idiot

I gave Hugh Hewitt credit last month for letting Fr. Joseph Fessio speak at length on Hewitt’s radio show about the Pope’s criticisms of Islam. Of course, Hewitt didn’t do anything to make that happen; Fessio was the one who was speaking, and Hewitt just listened. Now Hewitt is condemning in very harsh terms the European newspapers who he says have offended all Muslims by publishing the cartoons of Muhammad. Hewitt is hopeless. He knows as much about Islam as President Bush and Secretary Rice together, meaning that he knows less than nothing. He still thinks that the only Muslims making threats over the cartoons are the “radicals,” when in fact it is the so-called “moderates” who, at the drop of a hat, are all over the media screaming bloody murder about an “affront” to a religious community which daily fills its newspapers and television with inconceivably vile hate speech against Jews, while the Western world makes no protests about this. Has anyone asked these outraged Muslims what standing they have to protest cartoons they find offensive to them? And has anyone asked them what exactly is offensive about the cartoons? Most of the cartoons are utterly anodyne. One shows a fierce figure (presumably Muhammad)wielding a knife in a threatening way, one shows a figure with a headdress that is also a bomb. But what grounds to Muslims have to object to these images? Muhammad is the author of the Koran, which repeatedly calls on Muslims to kill and behead Christians and Jews, and virtually every page of which is filled with sadistic invocations of the horrible punishments that await non-Muslims. The Islamic terrorists of today do their devilish work in the name of Allah of whom Muhammad was the spokesman. What, then, are these cartoons saying about Muhammad that Muhammad himself did not say himself? What are they saying about Muhammad that Muslims have not believed and affirmed as their sacred truth for the last 1,400 years? So what is all the excitement about? People like Hewitt who side against the European newspapers are traitors to the West. And now Bush’s State Department has sided against the European papers as well.

Meanwhile, Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim, has an article in the English-language version of Der Spiegel arguing that if the West does not stand in solidarity with the Danish, the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest.

Warraq has also distributed the below passage from Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro, from the famous freedom of speech monologue by Figaro in Act V, Scene 3. Here is is recounting his many careers, among which was one as an author:

I cobble together a verse comedy about the customs of the harem, assuming that, as a Spanish writer, I can say what I like about Mohammed without drawing hostile fire. Next thing, some envoy from God knows where turns up and complains that in my play I have offended the Ottoman empire, Persia, a large slice of the Indian peninsula, the whole of Egypt, and the kingdoms of Barca [Ethiopa], Tripoli, Tunisi, Algeria, and Morocco. And so my play sinks without trace, all to placate a bunch of Muslim princes, not one of whom, as far as I know, can read but who beat the living daylights out of us and say we are “Christian dogs.” Since they can’t stop a man thinking, they take it out on his hide instead.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 03, 2006 06:55 PM | Send