“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” said mass-murdering Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung. Again proving him at least partially correct is that teachers in Norway are now afraid to show Muhammad cartoons in “free-speech” classes — especially after the Muslim jihadist beheading of French teacher Samuel Paty, who had displayed such images.
As Sputnik reports, “A recent survey has indicated that Norwegian teachers are increasingly wary of subjects deemed controversial, such as the notorious Muhammad cartoons and free speech.”
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“Almost half of all the surveyed teachers in Norway found it [highly] demanding to teach students about topics that may be offensive,” the site continues. “Among others, one in three is afraid to show caricatures of Islamic Prophet Muhammad during classes, admittedly for fear of the consequences.”
Meanwhile, Paty’s murder has caused The New York Times to express a different fear: that “Islamophobia” will rise in France.
If the Times meant a “phobia” in the term’s true sense — a “fear” — the paper would be correct, though the effect goes, once again, far beyond France.
Just consider Norwegian teacher Kjersti Marie Heldaas. Interviewed recently by RT, she said that after “the murder of Samuel Paty, I decided not to show them [the cartoons] at all because I felt vulnerable; I felt that my profession was attacked at the moment, and the freedom of speech, of expression, was attacked….”
“And I wanted to find other ways to express myself and achieve the same goal with my teaching,” she continued. “Because the caricature drawings are not the goal; they’re just part of criticism against a religion”
In reality, the “goal” (of the jihadists, anyway) is to silence “un-Islamic” expression by enforcing a de facto Sharia speech code. And, mission accomplished — at least in part.
In fact, all told, 60.2 percent of Norwegian teachers said they wouldn’t show Mohammad cartoons in class, and 37.2 percent said they feared the consequences of showing Muhammad cartoons to a “large” or “very large” extent.
Thus did Jihad Watch proprietor Robert Spencer open his article on this story with the observation, “Terrorism works.” This is unfortunately all too true with respect to achieving worldly aims. Just consider the results of the years of agitation and months of rioting that recently wracked our country:
Rioting instigator Black Lives Matter has raised millions, and some say billions, of dollars from craven, callow corporations; politicians have pandered and made concessions to the organization and radical Left in general; and Biden/Harris have been elevated via a fraudulent “election.” The actions were thus a rousing success — from a Mao Tse-tung perspective.
Yet whether here in the United States, in Norway, or somewhere else, the problem is that too many are governed by their fears; lamentably common throughout history, they are the “good” men who do nothing, to paraphrase Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke.
Another problem is self-delusion and philosophical juvenility. For example, teacher Heldaas mentioned her nation’s hate-speech laws but also “freedom of speech.” But having such laws means that, by definition, there is no “freedom of speech”; rather, there are a set of boundaries within which one may legally render commentary. A people can decide to have boundaries if it wants, but it shouldn’t fool itself about the matter. For it’s more likely you’ll embrace bad policy if you lie to yourself about what you’re actually doing.
What’s really going on in the West is a clash of cultures: The jihadists are trying to replace Westerners’ boundaries with their own. But whether such boundaries will be legislated — or just remain social “laws” “(imperatives and stigmas) — every civilization has them in some form.
After all, every society has a sense of virtue; or a set of “values” (which can be positive or negative), as secular moderns are wont to say. And to paraphrase a point I read long ago, stigmas are corollaries of values. If you’re going to value certain qualities — such as honesty, perseverance, normal sexuality or tolerance for an abnormal variety — it follows that their opposites will be devalued. Thus, since society will always uphold some set of values, it will always have stigmas. Ergo, boundaries.
What this means is that the job for any civilization is to elevate and stigmatize the right things, namely and respectively, the Truth and lies. Of course, this is pretty hard for people to do when they wallow in the confusion we call moral relativism and, consequently, don’t know which is which.
