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The Bonfire of the Goons

So last week I go and write a little post that pokes fun at the Cartoon Jihad. Not the Jihad itself, but the goons who held up signs that said things like “Crush, kill, exterminate, butcher… Get ready for the real holocaust, 9/11 is coming again”, you remember those signs right?

Well, the other day on Powerline, I catch this one:

And that one picture struck me dumb and here’s why. First, it’s very legible and its in English. Its quite deliberate, this isn’t some last minute thought that was badly considered and hastily posted. This is exactly what this protester wanted to say and more importantly wanted you to see.

Second, this protest – is in the streets of Germany!

Now I’ve always been lead to believe that modern Germany isn’t exactly “down with the H-man”. So, I had to ask myself, if the poster is written in English, and its being displayed in a street protest in Germany, just to whom is this aimed at? Just who is the intended audience? and why?

Now while I’m engaged in a little background investigation on that subject, I start getting some very interesting trackback and comments on the previous post that I made on the protesters. Now, I want to be clear here, at no point did I ever post the dreaded Danish cartoons, what I did was to post pictures of the jihadi goons and their world wide protests over the cartoons.

Apparently that got someone’s attention because based some of the comments I have received since then it would seem there is a ‘fatwa’ against Salman Rushdie, Danish cartoonists and yours truly. It has come to my attention thanks to the small number of literate “cartoon goons” that they are just as upset that I am poking fun at them as they were of the cartoon depictions of their spiritual guide.

Well strike me dead with a bolt of lightning to find out that not only can you not poke fun at Mohammed, but if you dare pour a little comedic limelight on the jihadists themselves and cause them any sort of embarrassment, then that’s just as bad in the minds of these thugs as spray painting a mosque with a Star of David.

I was at lunch the other day with a friend, a good guy but a regular foil of mine. We got into a discussion about the ‘Cartoon jihad’ and his take was essentially that “we need to show respect to other cultures because its our disrespect of these other cultures that has caused all the problems with hatred against us in the first place”. This of course got me to thinking. So I asked him in return; “ then you must also be of the opinion that the European Jews certainly must’ve done something to deserve all that hatred from the Nazis, right? It couldn’t possibly be something else that caused the Nazis to hate the Jews, by your way of thinking, the Jews must’ve done something to deserve their fate at the hands of the Nazis, right?“

My friend is not a bad guy, he has simply done what most people do when faced with irrational hate, and that is try to put an understandable rational face on it. But here’s what it comes down to kids, this whole thing has nothing whatsoever to do with cartoon depictions of Mohammed or Islam, this is the politics of the playground, the strategy of the schoolyard bully. The 'Cartoon Jihad' has nothing to do with “correcting a grievance” or protesting the treatment of Islam at the hands of an infidel power, it’s about intimidation. It’s about a group of people filled with impotency expressing themselves in the only way they feel they have left to bring honor to the dishonored.

All of this stuff, the whole Cartoon Jihad is the whole brownshirt street thuggery crystalnacht show, only this time, You and I, the Danes and anyone else who dares to stick out their necks against the goons, are the Jews of this particular pogrom.

I’m not at all bothered by street level goons and I’m not really surprised when I see them in action. I know this breed well. I went to 14 schools in 10 years before I went away to college and in every school I ever went to there was group of these goons. They travel in packs, they do their work with an deserved, yet oversized reputation based on acts of intimidation and extortion. They are the small loudmouth boys surrounded by even smaller boys all trying to act bigger than the next kid to them in the pack and scared to death to be seen as the cowards they truly are, always willing to do any amount of violence in an attempt to hide that cowardice from public exposure.

But the force that gives the goons their real power and what they depend on in each and every case is the ‘good and decent people of the world’ who don’t want to make any waves, who aren’t violent, don’t want any trouble and always assume a bit of their own guilt in the creation of these little monsters.

We’ll leave you alone to your bully games you poor child, now you do the same to us and leave us alone too. ok?

You see the goons I can handle. It’s the craven cowards that make up a great number of otherwise decent people of the world that really get under my skin.

I can’t tell you the number of times in various schools where I ran up against a group of goons, only to have the “so called decent folk” get mad at me for supposedly making the bullies angry, as if it was I who was creating the problem in the first place! “ You must’ve done something to make them mad” the school authorities would say, knowing full well the whole sordid history of the goons that existed before I arrived. No matter what school it was, the story was always the same.

"Don’t upset the goons, you must’ve done something to deserve their anger, you are as much at fault as they are.”

My all time favorite one liner from a clueless school Vice-Principal was this one:

“You brought it on yourself”...
I hated that one more than all the others. I still do.

“Don’t make waves Frank. You don’t know who these guys are” people would say, always afraid that it was my defiant actions against the goons were what was really making things worse and not the intimidation and extortion at the hands of the goons that was in fact the real problem.

I knew back then who those guys were and I still know now. Some of them are now visiting my site leaving comments of intimidation and threats. But the real people I worry about are the so-called “decent people of the world” who are now spending a great deal of time once again doing the dirty work of the goons. The EU is doing its level best to now write new laws to ensure that “Islam is not defamed”; Editors have been fired, newspapers have been shutdown, and here is yet another example of where I am deeply and horribly appalled at the actions of otherwise decent people helping feed “the goon bonfire” - a former President and Vice President of this country have gone as far to call for the original cartoonists to be arrested and persecuted according to the law (can you say “a chill wind blows” Tim Robbins? Well I can.)

There have been serious death threats and bounties on the lives of anyone in any way associated with the Danish cartoons, all while decent people “tut-tut” and say with a straight face that somehow the people who published the cartoons must’ve deserved all the violence that has been generated. (“don’t wake waves Frank, you might make them mad at us”. It’s a phrase that cries out to me through the ages when I hear "appeasement" and I’m sad to say that I'm hearing it now all too often.)

I’m appalled at the goons and what they do, but I’m even more appalled at the rest of us and what we do in response to these goons almost as regular as clockwork.

Let's get this straight, These protests are not about "blasphemous cartoons", its not even about Islam. It’s about the goons. It’s about the mob, and the mentality of the mob. But more importantly it’s about how we give in to the mob. It’s as if we want them to like us and every time we try to make them like us by being nice in response to their intimidation, we strengthen them.

We, as "decent people" just cant believe in the irrationality of hate, that sometimes the brownshirt just needs a target to focus its anger and any target in a pinch will do. The mob the individual goon hides behind and the hatred they all live within don't need a rational reason when picking targets of opportunity. This time it was the cartoons, next time it will be "eating with your left hand" or not wearing a headscarf or some other alleged grievance that will justifies the mob in its need feed on the blood of ‘good and decent’ people.

But just so you know I’m going to go on making fun of the "Cartoon Jihadis" because I think they deserve to be held up to ridicule. Whenever I see a picture of a placard put up by a Jihadi that honors Hitler, you can count on me to point out that there isn’t a dimes worth of difference between that picture I placed at the top of the post and what you used to see displayed at skinhead KKK rallies.

I don’t think anyone would argue that black people must’ve done something to get the Klan angry at them and are therefore partially responsible for the outpouring of hatred that comes with a cross burning, but there are many people willing to say that I must’ve done something to justify the ‘cartoon goons’ hatred of me, the hatred of my country, and finally to make the goons hate my very existence.

I didn’t do anything to make the Jihadists mad at me, and I’m not responsible for being their target, but I am responsible for how I respond to being a target for their hate.

Unlike many of the Jihadis, I am a free man. I am free to choose, what I do, what I say how I say it who I say it to and when I say it. In this case, I choose to not be intimidated. I choose to not be terrorized. I chose not to have my freedom approved by living under their standards according to their approval; the adult equivalent of paying these goons my lunch money for the priveledge to eat in peace at recess.

I will eat with my left hand; I will eat pork that has been bar-be-queued with some form of alcohol based sauce. I will hang out and befriend Jews, Buddists, Hindus and even the heathen Scientologists, I will watch movies with women who are not my wife; I will look at women who do not have a headscarf or even a bra for that matter. I will eat Danish Cheese and I will even stoop so low as to drink Danish Beer.

I am the Infidel. koo-koo-ca-choo...

I will do as I damned well please and all the while I will laugh as hard as I can at the 'bully boys' in Pakistan, Iran and Syria who think that I am somehow worried at what they might think of me and my infidel ways. I will also, despite everything they have done to make me believe the opposite, continue to believe that the mass population of Muslims worldwide are made up of people just like myself who only want to live in peace.

I will also do everything I can to help mass population of Muslims do exactly that, but I will not live in fear of the goons and I will not live in Sharia law in my own home unless its my idea in the first place (but don’t get your hopes up boys...)

Today, I was reminded of a time in history when another group of goons were busy intimidating the world and the good and decent people in it, while the people of the world laid prostate in fear in front of this mob. One man, an artist, took the position that this particular pack of goons deserved not to be feared, but to be mocked and held up to ridicule.

His name was Charles Chaplin. His work was called “The Great Dictator”.

Chaplin plays an unnamed private soldier in a fictional country called “Tomania” as a parallel of Nazi Germany. The leader of this parallel country has also undertaken to persecute the Jews. Mr. Chaplin uses the film to lampoon the leaders of the European fascist movement, from Hitler, to Mussolini, to Goebbels, to Goering, no one is left out of his sights.

It’s a good movie, one of about half a dozen that I remember that made light of Hitler and his particular brand of goons. But that’s not what I was remembered as being important about that movie. What was important about that movie is that is was made in the “age of appeasement”, while all the others came after the war was well under way when it was finally safe and expected to mock Hitler. But when Chaplin made the movie, the “good and decent people” such as United Artists and the British government tried to stop him from making it or even distributing the film. Imagine that! That there was a time when "good and decent people" said you shouldn’t anger Mr. Hitler and the Nazis. They tried to censor someone from making a simple parody about Hitler,somehow not wanting to bring shame on the Nazis. Imagine what they would do today! (wait you don’t have to imagine, its happening again all around us! )

The movie was a risk, a financial, professional and personal risk. Chaplin took that risk; he refused to be intimidated while the great leaders of Europe were willing to let a man take a beating from the goons. Imagine the intimidation for one man to stand against, but imagine all the other artists who felt that if the great Charles Chaplin could not speak, then what chance to did they have to speak?

This is the power of the mob. The power to silence. A power they dont have, but we give them.

I also remembered a bit of the closing speech that Charlie Chaplin gives in the movie to tie it all together. It says all I want to say to "the mob", any mob and any group of goons or cowards who want to empower the goons by "looking the other way".

Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it is written that the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They cannot fulfill that promise. They never will! Dictators will free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to the happiness of us all. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us unite!

Charlie didn’t give in to the mob or the goons and he didn’t give in to the intimidation of the ‘good and decent' cowards either. He was a free man and he when he saw evil he called it for what it was, and so should we. The goons don’t deserve our fear, but the do deserve our ridicule as do the cowards who meekly assist them in their work.

It’s not about the cartoons, dear reader. It’s about how far you are willing to let the goons push you into doing what they want. You power the mob, you make the goon.

Heil Hynkel!

Posted @ February 20, 2006 11:19 PM | Current Affairs

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