Cartoonist: “I understand the threat that we face”
“… and that’s why I do what I do”
We have been following the fallout from the shootings that centered around a “Draw Mohammed” event.
Most of the media is honing in on blaming the victims, as if Pam Geller had it coming to her.
Noah Rothman at Hot Air writes, The toxic implication that Pamela Geller had last night’s terror attack in Texas coming:
When political commentators note that there is no justification for sexual violence, they aren’t adhering to doctrinal feminism but the tenets of civilized Western thought. No woman, a responsible citizen would say, invites violence merely because their assailant was uncontrollably stimulated by their victim’s choice of attire. This is such a bedrock principle of human decency that it barely needs to be said. Only the most brutish and crude among us would contend otherwise. Why then does it appear vogue to imply that a terrorist attack on a Texas American Freedom Defense Initiative event organized by the group’s president, Pamela Geller, was the inevitable result of provocation on the part of the victims?
ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack, and promises more:
ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack outside a Prophet Mohammed cartoon contest in Texas — and warned of more attacks to come.
In a broadcast on its official radio channel Tuesday, the group said two Al Khilafa soldiers opened fire outside the event in Garland, a Dallas suburb. Al Khilafa is how ISIS refers to its soldiers.
The gunmen, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, wounded a security guard before police shot and killed them.
The ISIS radio announcer also referred to Simpson and Soofi as the terror group’s “brothers.” The announcement ended with this warning:
“We say to the defenders of the cross, the U.S., that future attacks are going to be harsher and worse. The Islamic State soldiers will inflict harm on you with the grace of God. The future is just around the corner.”
It turns out that the winner of the “Draw the Prophet” contest, Bosch Fawstin, was previously featured at Legal Insurrection when I covered a special conference organized by conservative talk show host Tammy Bruce:
And the story of the second speaker, Bosch Fawstin, is inspiring indeed. Bosch is an outstanding graphic artist. Unlike Legal Insurrection’s super-talented A.F. Branco, Bosch doesn’t do political cartoons so much as super-hero, comic-book inspired work. The basis for his art is the passion derived from being a former Muslim greatly angered by the events of September 11, 2001.
Needless to say, DC and Marvel comics won’t be picking up his work soon, so check it out HERE.
Fawstin was interviewed on Greta after the shooting:
Here is a tweet with his winning entry:
On behalf of all TAMs, congrats @BoschFawstin on winning the Draw Muhammad contest. Grateful you & all are safe! pic.twitter.com/Pg8BeGpR1N
— Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) May 5, 2015
Fawstin explains his inspiration:
Bosch Fawstin, winner of the “Draw the Prophet” contest in Garland, Texas, says the shooting deaths of two attackers outside the building where the contest took place Sunday shows why Americans must continue to stand for free speech.
“I never set out to draw Muhammad. I never set out to become a critic of Islam until post-9/11, until the Danish cartoons. That’s when we were all forced into this defense of free speech,” Fawstin said Monday on Fox News Channel’s “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.”
“We have to defend it as artists, as writers, as thinkers,” he said. Defenders of free speech must hit back not with violence but with the truth, he said.
“With our art, with our writing … we can’t be cowed by this, because once free speech goes, it’s over.”
The talented artist walked away with $10,000 in prize money…richly deserved. When specifically asked about the shooting, Fawstin simply responded:
They came to kill us and died for it. Justice. #GarlandAttack
— Bosch Fawstin (@BoschFawstin) May 4, 2015
For those of you who what to hear more from Fawstin, here is the Canto Talk show that features my interview with Fawstin:
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Comments
Hurray … the cartoon is not censored here. Fox and all MSM is choosing to obey sharia law, even when the drawn Mohammad is central to their news.
Martha MacCallum just said “you’re giving people the opportunity to draw these cartoons, even though it may be incendiary and end up in people’s deaths”.
So she puts blame directly on the drawer, not those murderers being faithful to sharia law. Martha hedges just a little by saying “may end up in” rather than “cause”, but little difference. Bill Donohue (Catholic League) is also a submissive. And of course government policy is to not ever attach “Muslim” with the word “terrorist”.
South Park famously edited out Mohammad, despite all the wars fought in his name, going back to when to Mohammad himself, being the murderer and slaughterer, across Christian lands in those days. The MSM and the rest are acting out of fear and cowardice, not respect.
Many Christians (and Jews) are very naive about Islam. They think, “Muslims believe in God just like we do; they pray a lot; they favor modesty. They’re really our cousins in faith, so we need to stand in solidarity with them in the face of rampant secularism and atheism.” Too many Christians fail to see that (aside from praying and “modesty”) the ethics of Islam are in many ways the polar opposite Christian and Jewish ethics.
Others have a more self-righteous, patronizing view: “Sure, some Muslims may fly into a rage and resort to violence when they feel offended, but we as Christians need to reach out in charity and try to protect them from anything that hurts their feelings. We can’t really expect them to control their rage (like we do) when their religion is insulted, can we?”
south park did not censor it. comedy central did.
it was shipped to comedy central approx 1 hour before showtime like normal.
comedy central then ran a live censor on it w/o matt and treys knowledge.
yes, thanks. I meant to say that heh. Yeah, obviously they didn’t censor their own cartoon.
There is a mosque in Garland, Texas. It was there yesterday, it’s there today, and it will be there tomorrow. After two radical Muslims attempted to massacre some infidels down the road a bit, there was no angry mob of Texans storming the place with F-350s and rifles. If any vehicle full of armed men rushed to the Muslims’ place of worship, you can be sure that it was the local police exercising an abundance of caution and nothing more.
It’s easy to be snarky–”Oh, yay for us! No massacre, give Texas a cookie!” But only those parochial minds with the narrowest of experience could fail to appreciate how unusual that is in the world.
—Kevin Williamson
We are allowed to “provoke” and to be provoked. That is, until the Collective gets its way.
You can see the trends very clearly. They are very comfortable now coming out for totalitarianism. They don’t bother with the mask any more, and tell us that we need to drop that whole 1st Amendment dealie. Seriously. Ol’ Walleyes is out for it.
After all, it’s safer. Right…???
It is possible to dislike Geller, like what she did here, and realize that it was an act intended to provoke a response. Geller may have gotten more than she bargained for, but she knew what she was risking and what the results of the worst case scenario might be as a result. She and those who participated are to be praised as courageous, not demeaned as victims. It is courageous to risk violence in service of one’s beliefs. Victims are helpless, not courageous.
What Martin Luther King and a lot of others did was designed to provoke a response.
Geller made the comparison to Rosa Parks this morning on Fox. MacCallum was almost aghast, as if there is no comparison, “how dare she”.
True perhaps, Americans are not victimized in the same way, but we still must resist and disobey their command, for our sakes and for the Christians in the Middle East. They face savage slaughter and vicious enslavement, far worse than blacks suffered in America in the fifties.
Obama may idly watch Christians being slaughtered by the offsprings of his Muslim Brotherhood friends, but Americans should proudly demonstrate resistance. The MSM delivers a propaganda win to radical Islam when they refuse to show the cartoon.
Resist we much.
Braver than Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks didn’t expect to be shot at. Arrested, maybe, but not shot at.
You beat me to the draw (so to speak) while I was being long-winded on the same point.
The comparison is not so farfetched. There were probably people in 1955 saying, “She knew the rules and she broke them. She should have expected to be arrested!” Now people are saying, “They knew about the Islamic rules and they broke them. They should have expected Muslims to be very angry!”
The penalty for Mrs. Parks was being arrested and then released on bail. The designated penalty for the cartoonists and their allies was death. That penalty was prevented in Garland, but it has been carried out thousands of times around the world, even in Paris.
This is not to diminish the suffering of black Americans under segregation (or slavery), but to point out the grave oppression that Islam inflicts on people wherever it gains enough power to do so — even when Muslims are still a small minority of the population. Right here, right now, we haven’t seen a lot of outright violence and force, but Islamic oppression is certainly at work in the form of social shaming and infidel self-censorship in order to avoid the violence.
Look around the world and see what Muslims intend for you.
The event was not “intended to provoke a response” in the sense you imply — that is, to make people violently angry. It was intended to assert the right of non-Muslims to be free from the onerous proscriptions of a hateful totalitarian creed.
All the fretting about “provoking” people is designed to excuse Muslims for their singularly violent response to anything that doesn’t adhere to their own superstitions.
It is not the responsibility of non-Muslims to tiptoe around the volatile sensitivities of Muslims. It is the responsibility of Muslims to learn that they have no right to impose the rules of their creed on everyone else; they have no right to expect us to refrain from criticizing a personage and a doctrine that we consider evil.
It is morally backward to argue that we must stop criticizing and mocking a creed BECAUSE OF its tendency to inspire violent intolerance.
And besides their rules acting as oppression, a step toward greater submission to other demands, there is also the censorship effect.
Cartoons are very powerful, or pictures or actors portraying the real life of Mohammad. The prize winning photo above should be in every paper, revealing his true character. Instead the MSM censors that message. They have the whole of major media well trained.
Weasel Zippers points out accurately the difference between Paris and Garland was the good guys had guns too.
I love my First and Second amendment rights; especially when the latter is used to protect the former. It’s freaking beautiful.
They had guns in Paris too. You say maybe only by police? That was the case in Texas too.
The attackers in Paris had more time to plan. Even so they made mistakes. But the defense in Paris was not as well thought out – there were maybe not enough armed police.
Also, for instance, a woman was threatened into opening the door.
They did not have guns in Paris as evidenced by the Police Officer that was shot on the ground.
How do you know only the police had guns at the Texas event? I would speculate that had the attackers made it past the guards there would have been civilians with firearms to meet them.
In Paris there were no armed police. At least, not for the first 20 minutes or so (or longer); not until the SWAT-team-equivalent could be summoned and equipped. The first two officers to respond were just as helpless to act as the cartoonists themselves. And the woman threatened into opening the door just shows that “hardware”-based security measures can be worked around with “software”-based attacks (i.e. the weakest link in any security plan is the people involved; true of both network security and physical security).
Contrast that with Garland, Texas. The first two officers to respond were well-equipped enough on their persons to stop the threat, and almost certainly had rifles in their trunks should their pistols prove ineffective. No SWAT team necessary, though I’m sure they were (eventually) deployed, too.
first responders did not have guns.
…………..!!!!?
“They had guns…?”
Paris Texas, maybe. Not Paris, France.
Texas was a one-time event – the situation in Paris was constant and the location did not change.
You mean a “one time event” like the Seattle girl who had to change her identity and go into hiding for promoting a “Everybody draw Mohammed” day and will never speak against Islam again or a one time event as in Texans killed the guys who needed killing?
Paris was also a one time event. The bad guys with guns killed the good guys who did not have guns. Then France proceeded to hold a bunch of events to explain to the world how misunderstood Islam is.
Texas will probably hold some sensitivity training that involves pig races.
…with bab-be-qubed poke immediately following…