‘Free To See It Our Way’

Even while the Obama administration is being dragged, kicking and screaming, to the obvious fact already acknowledge by Libya’s president that the Benghazi attack had “nothing to do with” the trailer for “Innocence of Muslims,” the Detroit Free Press is reporting that “[c]oncern over an anti-Islam film that sparked protests around the world continues to build in metro Detroit . . .” (“Protesters march in Canton against anti-Islam film”).

Continues to build? Why? Is the trailer more dangerous now than it was on 9/11? Especially after “filmmaker” Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was bundled into a black maria by Eric Holder’s feds for (ahem) a “probation violation”.

Canton’s rally sounds less edgy than Dearborn’s on Friday night, which was attended, reportedly, by 1,000 people, including “Muslim leaders, the executive director of the Detroit NAACP, Dearborn Mayor Jack O'Reilly Jr., and U.S. Rep. John Conyers, a Detroit Democrat.”

According to reporter Niraj Warikoo, the message of the two rallies, and of the even more rallies expected in October, is the same, that there’s a “growing tide of Islamophobia” in America. “It’s relentless,” Dearborn attorney Tarek Baydoun (and local Islamist foghorn) was quoted to say.

To recap: in the wake of a paramilitary jihad attack on an American mission in the Middle East, the murder of our ambassador, and a wave of similar Islamic attacks on U.S. missions and burnings of the American flag in more than a score of Muslim nations, people are rallying in response to a growing tide of attacks upon Muslims.

Interestingly, Dearborn rally participants “called for restrictions that limit free speech that would offend Islam and other religions. ‘Freedom of speech is not freedom of blasphemy,’ read one sign.”

Now it becomes clearer. All of this could have been avoided if we only had a law against offending Muslims. Which just happens to be the viewpoint of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which has been pushing for the criminalizing of defamation of religion (the Islamic religion, that is) for years. As the current head of the OIC, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, sees it, “Freedom of thought and belief ends where the freedom of thought and belief of others starts.”

In other words, your freedom to your opinion ends where my opinion begins. Erdogan’s a Turk, not an Arab, (who we’re told invented algebra) so maybe we can overlook Erdogan’s algebraic contradiction here.  It’s just that he wants to go beyond that popular argument-ending notion of “agreeing to disagree” to the more unifying -- and blasphemy-ending -- notion of agreeing to agree – or else. But never mind the muddled logic, the kernel of what Erdogan is proposing is crystal clear: that “freedom of thought and belief ends.”

Period.

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