(Fred Weinberg) – I watched CNN’s “coverage” of the two radical Muslims trying to shoot up the Draw Muhammad cartoon get together in Garland, Texas.
For those of you who live on another planet, two Jihaddis apparently drove from Phoenix to Garland—a suburb of Dallas—with assault weapons and body armor, jumped out of their car and started to shoot in front of the venue. They were both taken out by an uncommonly well trained Garland School District policeman who killed both shooters with his service weapon—a serious feat of marksmanship. An unarmed security guard was shot by the terrorists but did not suffer life threatening injuries. ISIS took belated credit for the botched terror event.
So CNN—which was once more or less accurately called the Chicken Noodle News network—has Don Lemon together with muslimgirl.net editor Amani Alkhat, some imam nobody has ever heard of and they were all hopelessly overmatched by Alan Dershowitz, who literally wrote the book, both in and out of court, on the First Amendment.
The Muslims were outraged at the Draw Muhammad cartoon event which they seemed to think should have been banned because it was “offensive” and “provocative”.
In Pakistan, it surely would have been.
But this is America and the whole can of worms reminds me of a story I’ve told in this space a few times.
On September 10th, 2001, I agreed to sell KRLV in Las Vegas. We took an earnest money deposit and I went home that evening.
I, of course, awoke to 9-11 the next morning and the reality that, sale pending or not, we had a responsibility to our listeners to stay on the air through a very traumatic event and keep company with them. (It was not my first time. We owned a chain of Oklahoma radio stations on April 19, 1995 when Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal building.)
So, I tuned into my own station from home and heard a young woman on the top of the hour network news say, “America was brought to its knees this morning by…” (I won’t embarrass that network by rubbing their noses in it this many years later because none of those people are there any more.)
I called the studio line and told our morning host, Rodd Stowell, to pull the network off the air in mid newscast and come straight to us on the phone where I said that America couldn’t be “brought to its knees” by a bunch of terrorists—it’s way too big and diverse. And, if you don’t believe that, get in your car and drive a lap of America.
And, most importantly, I pointed out that we have an absolute right to freedom of speech and religion guaranteed by the very first amendment to our constitution.
It is not uncommon in this country to find people with one ideological bent arguing for the free speech of people with the opposite ideological perspective. (I hate what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.)
Alan Dershowitze, as an example, years ago was one of the lawyers who defended the rights of neo Nazis to march in largely Jewish Skokie, Illinois despite the fact that he happens to be Jewish.
That’s how we used to handle freedom of speech in this country.
I watched as an alleged journalist threw softball questions to Amani Alkhat who really seemed to want to say that the Draw Muhammad event shouldn’t have been allowed to happen because it would incite violence. She danced around the subject and said it without saying it.
It appears that Muslims—even those wringing their nice middle class American hands over the weekend’s violence—would rather they be allowed to ban people from taking verbal and written shots at their religion.
I would suggest to muslimgirl.net that she probably could not run her little advertising supported web site in, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and a whole bunch of other nations that do NOT have a guarantee of free speech.
This is America. If you really don’t like freedom, why not move to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and see how the largest groups of Muslims live?
Mr. Weinberg is publisher of the Penny Press. Get to know more about him by visiting www.PennyPressNV.com.
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