Sultan Knish
When Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, one of the Navy SEALS who died fighting in Benghazi, met with Hillary Clinton, she assured him
that, “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did
the video.” And they got him, officially on charges of violating
parole, unofficially on charges of violently offending violent Muslims.
The
woman whose policy had overthrown the Libyan government and then
placed a barely defended diplomatic facility in the middle of a city of
terrorists, did not promise the grieving father that his son's killers
would pay. She promised him that the man who offended his son's
killers would pay.
Not only would his son be the first casualty
of that appeasement policy, but the Constitution that his son had sworn
to support and defend would be the second casualty.
Mark
Basseley Youssef is not the first filmmaker sent to prison by a
Democrat in the White House for making the wrong kind of movie that
interfered with his foreign policy. The first man was Robert Goldstein
whose movie, the The Spirit of '76, about the American Revolution, came
at a time when Woodrow Wilson was trying to get Americans deeper into
aiding the British in World War I.
Wilson's Justice Department
directed Chicago Police Deputy Superintendent Metellus Lucullus Cicero
Funkhouser to confiscate The Spirit of '76 and Goldstein spent three
years in prison and eventually died in a Nazi concentration camp.
Youssef and Goldstein made bad movies that were politically
inconvenient.
The Spirit of '76 was not welcome in 1917 and
unlike the stream of hundred million dollar movies recreating September
11 with robots, space aliens and evil government agents, the origin of
Muslim violence is not an appropriate subject for a movie in the present
day. "History is history and fact is fact", Judge Bledsoe conceded and
convicted Goldstein anyway.
Goldstein's Federal trial took
place in the Southern District of California. Mark Basseley Youssef's
trial took place in the Central District of California. Goldstein was
convicted of creating a movie calculated to arouse antagonism and
enmity. That is the unofficial charge brought against Youssef. Goldstein
was convicted of reminding Americans of the origin of their country
and Youssef is guilty of reminding them of the origin of Islam.
Using
Chicago politics and California courtrooms to cover up a progressive
president's policies has a certain resonance a century later. Youssef
and his video trailer made a convenient scapegoat so that progressive
politicians could avoid talking about the collapse of Libya after their
regime change operation into roving bands of Islamist militias.
After
Obama denounced Youssef in every forum from 60 Minutes to the United
Nations to Pakistani television, he was arrested to protect the
Innocence of Muslims and the Innocence of Obama. Now the New York Times
has gotten back into the game, once again blaming the YouTube trailer
made by a Coptic Christian for a wave of Muslim terrorism.
Blaming
the Innocence of Muslims briefly silenced the more dangerous questions
about why Americans had died in Benghazi. Youssef, like Goldstein,
was a suspicious foreigner, and an excellent choice as a scapegoat and
so the media focused on his many aliases, and not why Americans died in
Benghazi.
Americans died in Benghazi for the same reason that
American hostages had been taken in Iran and for the same reason that
Leon Klinghoffer had been murdered on the Achille Lauro and US Marines
had died in Beirut. They died because their government had appeased
Muslims, had given their terrorist groups hope that they could achieve
their aims if they killed enough people, had saved them at the moment
of their greatest weakness and had elevated them to power.
The innocence of Obama is intertwined with the innocence of Muslims.
If
Muslims are innocent of terror, then so is the foreign policy that has
empowered them. But if Muslims are guilty of terror then the
politicians who have pandered to them are guilty of enabling their
terror.
If Muslims are innocent of terror, then Obama is
innocent of complicity in their terror. But if Muslim terror is a real
thing, then the man who helped them unleash it by toppling stable
governments and replacing them with Islamist movements and militias
shares in their guilt.
The real censorship of the War on Terror
is not the censorship of dissent from the policy of fighting
terrorists. Such dissent can be found in every newspaper editorial
office. It is the dissent from the policy of fighting the symptoms of
terror, rather than the roots of terror, from the policy of not
fighting Islamic terrorism, that is censored and punished, that is a
firing offense and a locking away offense.
In the age of terror,
the dangerous ones are not those who denounce the war, but those who
denounce the lack of a war, who upset the balance of an inept policy
that seeks a small controllable conflict by closing our eyes to the
larger threat. It is these dangerous ones who must be censored so that
we may go on safely losing our nation building wars, bringing home
coffins, Korans and refugees without ever questioning whether this
should be so.
The War on Terror has not impeded the civil liberties of those who oppose the war, but of those who oppose the terror.
In
1919, the same year that Goldstein's appeal was being heard, the
Supreme Court ruled on Schenck v. United States. The case is obscure,
but it has given us a famous phrase from the legal mouth of Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes. "The most stringent protection of free speech
would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater."
This
timeless phrase, long since legally discredited, came to life when
Muslims began burning embassies while the White House claimed that the
fault lay not in its foreign policy, which had overturned allies and
replaced them with murderous Islamists, but with a movie. Pundits dug
up Schenck and began penning essays suggesting that offending a Muslim
should be as illegal as shouting fire in a crowded mosque.
Under
the new civil liberties, the right of a Muslim to praise terrorists,
upload videos promoting terrorism and even funding terrorist charities
is sacrosanct, but make a movie mocking Mohammed and suddenly the Bill
of Rights won't be returning your phone calls as you are being
frog-marched to your new cell.
In civil liberties circles it is
claimed that the war against terrorism has deprived Muslims of their
civil rights, but in reality Muslims have gained rights, while we have
lost them. The balance between the civil rights of Americans and the
need to avoid offending Muslims has been shifting their way and we all
pay the price when we fly and we have begun paying it when we talk.
America's
first political prisoner in generations was arrested for offending
Muslims as a cover for the failed policy of appeasing Muslims. If
history is any guide, he will not be the last. The more bombs go off,
the more buildings burn and the more questions are asked, the more
Youssefs will be needed to deflect those questions and protect the
innocence of Muslims and of their political panderers.
"The most
stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely
shouting fire in a theater," Holmes said, and modern day Supreme Court
Justice Stephen Breyer has suggested that burning a Koran may be
considered a modern day version of the same thing.
But what if a
man isn't falsely shouting fire, what if there really is a fire? And
what if the theater management has him dragged away for causing a panic
even while the smell of charred flesh rises into the air and the red
curtains around the screen begin to burn?
And what if after all
the bodies are carried out on stretchers, the man is still brought to
trial for shouting fire in a crowded theater, and in his defense he
points to the burnt ruins of the theater as proof that there really was a
fire, only to be told that if he hadn't shouted, then there would have
been no fire.
"There was only a fire because people panicked,"
he is told, "and there was only a panic because you shouted. The thing
to do was to remain in your seat and wait until the proper authorities
had told you there was a fire. And if the authorities had determined
that there was no fire, then it was your duty to remain in your seat
and burn."
Shout that Islam is violent and Muslims carry out
violence and the fire marshal in charge of the tiny minority of fires
arrives to inform you that if you had not shouted, they would not have
turned violent. Whatever example of Muslim self-starting violence you
may dig up, the fire marshal will find some first cause for it that
began the violence, some offense committed by non-Muslims against
Muslims, even if it was a shoving match a thousand years ago in Spain
that started the whole thing.
The more fires break out, the more
the fire marshal insists that fires do not begin unless someone
notices them and warns other people. The more people die, the more the
moral authority of the fire marshal depends on perpetuating the lie
that fires are fueled by the human voice. And instead of a fire
department, there is a department of silencing people who warn that a
fire has broken out.
This
is our War on Terror, a war which is waged to convince Americans that
there is no such thing as Muslim terrorism and to convince Muslims
that they should stop being terrorists.
The more people die of
Muslim violence, the more the principle of the innocence of Muslims
must be upheld, because it is no longer just the innocence of Muslims
that is at stake, but the innocence of the political establishment
that looked away while the Muslim fires burned.
A political
establishment determined to protect its innocence will go to any
length, and political prisoners are the least of it.
After the
Arab Spring and the Libyan War, it has become impossible to untangle
the guilt of Obama from the guilt of Islamists. That is the dirty
secret that the fire marshals of the establishment are determined to
protect.
The cover-up of Islam's conduct has become their
cover-up of their own conduct as well. So long as Islam can claim
innocence, they can claim innocence as well, and those who challenge
the innocence of Muslims and by extension the innocence of the
political establishment will become the first political prisoners.
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