Those who rose to defend freedom of expression when Muslims protested against the publication of cartoons mocking Islam and the prophet, will they rise to defend the freedom of expression of a 17 years old girl, author of an eloquent animation condemning the war in Iraq ?
Why protect the freedom of expression of this young lady ? Because she was smeared, threatened and boat swifted in the ugliest way possible.
Will Salman Rushdie, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Anders Rasmussen and the Jyllandsposten, Irshad Manji, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the american christian neoconservative right and all those self called 'freedom lovers' rise to defend Ava Lowery against smear and ugly menace in the name of freedom of expression or will they let go ? Or is the war in Iraq a commodity to hide Racism, Islamophobia and criminal war mongering behind a curtain of false decency, freedom loving and political correctness and the moment someone raises the curtain on this ugliness, the whole thing becomes an 'inconvenient truth' * so Ava must stop doing anti-war animations ?
For more info link to Gert .
*To paraphrase Al-Gore for the title of his excellent and coming soon to a theatre near you documentary on global warming. My daughter watched it in her Ecology class recently and she told me a lot of good about it.
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Since March 29th 2006
5 comments:
Thanks for the link. To be fair, searching Blogger Search beta, Ava has received tremendous support after the smears, slander and threats.
Also to be fair, the arch-conservative columnist and blogger Michelle Malking has also recently received death threats, as well as members of her family. Those that really want to play hardball exist on both sides of the spectrum.
A radical left blog (Ed Strong), very well known, has over the last years also gradually descended into increased mudslinging and name calling. I rarely visit there now.
Gert,
I agree that we must be fair. However I think we should not relativise things. When Salman Rushdie speaks, the world listens. Did Ava get a support from such a heavy weight communicator and 'intellectual' ? May be I am missing something here.
As for the smearers, I have no doubt they exist on both sides. I don't classigy people as being from the right or the left, I classify them as irrational and intolerant extremists or rational and tolerant human beings. The american christian right, as a group have proven to be of the first category. It is no wonder that people can go from one extreme to another. Look at Hitchens (Christopher), look at Hirsi Ali, the only thing she could be is an extremist. She was a muslim fundamentalist before becoming an intolerant provocative extremist atheist. These are the most dangerous people on earth specially those who flip sides because what matters for them is not the cause they defend but to find a place where they can spill their rage and extremism.
"Did Ava get a support from such a heavy weight communicator and 'intellectual' ? May be I am missing something here."
Well, Ava isn't quite the intellectual heavy weight that Rushdie is (whether you like him or not, I'm in two minds on that). Ava's rise to some sort of fame is mainly limited to the Internet and bloggosphere, from where she is receiving considerable support. Perhaps later someone better known will step and take a stand.
As regards, Hirsi Ali, glad you brought her up. I was never quite in love with her as some seem to be. This seems to me to largely an attention seeker. Of course her film didn't warrant the reaction it got: that only played into the hands of Islamophobes anyway. I thought the film was in rather poor taste and a poor vehicle for the points she was trying to make; shock-tactics rarely lead to intelligent debate.
This is what so many unwavering pro-Israelis do: call anyone who dares criticise Israel an anti-Semite. Recently I've also been compared to David Irving (lol).
Extremism leaves no way in the middle. I knew it when I was 16 in Lebanon. If you were against all parties, because all of them went wrong, you were in a dangerous position. So you are with them or against them, as GW Bush articulated very clearly after september 11.
I got to be more precise about Rushdie. When I say that when he speaks the world listens, I don't think this is so because of his intellect but mainly thanks to the Mollahs !
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