The Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest

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Douglas Sutton
5 years ago
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1 of Muhammad and Islam. As Muhammad s followers killed more and more people, we needed critics of him more than ever and free people needed to stand up against these underhanded attempts to stifle all criticism of Islam, including honest investigations of how jihadists use Islamic texts and teachings to justify Jew-hatred, violence, supremacism, and oppression. The foes of free speech never give up. And neither should its defenders. The Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest I wasn t about to give into violent intimidation. On May 3, 2015 I held the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland, Texas, in the Curtis Culwell Center, where the Stand with the Prophet conference had been held. It was a beautiful event. Geert Wilders was the keynote speaker and we presented contest winner Bosch Fawstin with a check for $12,500 for his winning cartoon, which depicted Muhammad saying, You can t draw me! and the artist responding, That s why I draw you. That perfectly summed up what the event was all about: standing up against jihadist bullying and defending the freedom of speech. At the event, we featured historical images of Muhammad, many drawn by Muslims, alongside contemporary images of the Islamic prophet. Everything went off without a hitch until a member of my security team came in and told us there had been a shooting outside. Two Islamic jihadists from Phoenix, armed with rifles and explosives, drove up to the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland and attempted to gain entry to our event just as it ended. I was hurried to a safe room, while the audience was led to an auditorium in another part of the Curtis Culwell Center as police searched the area. The jihadis wounded the security guard Bruce Joiner. He was shot in the left calf by one of the savages. Thank G-d, he has fully recovered. Both jihadis were then killed by members of the security team I had hired. Bruce Joiner was wounded in a battle that is part of a longstanding war: the war against the freedom of speech. Joiner is a hero in that battle. We had been aware of the risk, spent thousands of dollars on security, and it paid off. The jihadis at our free speech event were not able to achieve their objective of replicating the massacre at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo. They were not able to kill anyone. We provided enormous security, in concert with 177

2 Fatwa the superb Garland police department. The men who took the aspiring killers down may have saved hundreds of lives. Make no mistake: if it weren t for the free speech conference, these jihadis would have struck somewhere else a place where there was less security. So why were some people blaming me? They said, Well, she provoked them! She got what she deserved! The attacks against me were astonishing. Laura Ingraham was one of many on the right who attacked me. Ingraham is a devout Roman Catholic. I understand that Roman Catholics don t like their religion mocked. But Roman Catholics don t kill when their religion is mocked and so no one talks about the importance of avoiding provoking them and how we must respect them. Roman Catholics have learned that. Mormons and others have learned that look at the play The Book of Mormon on Broadway, which won twelve Tony Awards. The Mormon Church s official response wasn t a call for murder. Instead they released a rather measured and polite statement. 3 Why must Ingraham condescend to Muslims and think they cannot learn tolerance? On the right, Ingraham was hardly alone in condemning me (although Ingraham has a history of flip-flopping of this issue she supported the Ground Zero mosque before she didn t). Bill O Reilly, Martha McCallum, Greta Van Susteren, the list is long. But by then I was not surprised, because there has for years now been an element of the right that is cowed, defensive, apologetic, submissive, and weak. This incident has been a defining moment. Some I thought were true proved false, and some I thought were false proved true. Rich Lowry, Bret Stephens, and Dennis Prager surprised me with their support. David French and Ian Tuttle were wonderful. Critics, on the other hand, said I was insulting an entire religion, a view held by our moderate allies such as Egypt and Qatar. They were wrong to assume we must submit to sharia in order to placate moderates, rather than saying that moderates need to accept the freedom of speech. Even New York Republican Peter King blamed me for the assassination attempt on my life at my free speech event in Garland. The jihadis are endangering lives, not me. He is saying we should curtail our activities in the face of violent intimidation. If that s the best congressman we have on this issue, we re sunk. That is the road to surrender and slavery. I will never take it. There has always been a subjugated, weak element of the conservative movement. That faction doesn t like me any more now than it ever did. 178

3 Garland was the first ISIS attack on American soil. Needless to say, every major newspaper and magazine attacked me in the wake of it. I was taken aback when Time magazine asked me to pen an explanation for why I did what I did. I was, of course, only too happy to oblige. If it is hate to stand up for free speech, we are in big trouble. The media and the cultural and political elites continue to self-enforce sharia without the consent of the American people. This is ultimately not about me; it is about whether America will stand for freedom or surrender. In December 2016, while hitting President-elect Trump and supposedly defending the freedom of speech, Megyn Kelly on NPR referred to Pam [sic] Geller, who there s no question is a hateful person, who held this Draw Muhammad contest down in Texas. Kelly said this in the context of defending the freedom of speech: Now she s a provocateur and she s not a fan of anyone who s Muslim from the sound of what she says, but this is America and she has the right to say those things. And she has the right to have a contest like that. 4 But in smearing me as hateful, Kelly demonstrated that she didn t really know what was at stake when Islamic jihadis attacked our free speech event in Garland. Why was I hateful for standing for the First Amendment? Was she copying the tactics of Islamic propagandists, smearing as hateful those of us who refused to submit to the most brutal and extreme ideology on the face of the earth? And I was a provocateur? Why? The Garland attack was part of a longstanding jihad war against the freedom of speech. Those who say I provoked the jihadis don t remember, or care to remember, that as jihadis were killing the twelve Muhammad cartoonists in Paris, their accomplice was murdering four Jews in a nearby kosher supermarket. Were the Jews hateful? Did they provoke the jihadis? I held the event in the same venue where Muslim leaders held a conference in support of sharia, in support of the ideology behind the Charlie Hebdo jihad massacre. Was that provocative? Should we submit to the devout Muslims who use violence to impose the speech laws under the sharia? Drawing Muhammad offends Islamic jihadists? So does being Jewish, as many anti-semitic attacks have proven, or being gay. Or being a free woman. How much accommodation of any kind should we give to murderous savagery? To kowtow to violent intimidation will only encourage more of it. 179

4 Fatwa Megyn Kelly should know that. What did Megyn Kelly know about my work as a whole? What did she do to help Rifqa Bary, the Ohio teenager who was threatened with death by her father for converting from Islam to Christianity? What had Megyn Kelly done for the other Muslim girls who wanted to live a free life, and whom I helped to safety? Megyn Kelly never had me on her show while she was on Fox. She covered the jihad attack against our free speech event in Texas for over a week but did not have me on. How does she know what I think, or why I did what I did? She made her stand for free speech regarding the Garland jihad attack while excoriating me. The thing about Kelly is that she assumed my mantle and championed my work while attacking and smearing me; that is the hallmark of a true second-hander. Meanwhile, the scalawags, scoundrels, and misanthropes to whom she gave a platform on her show were reprehensible. Kelly had oppressors and terror-tied operatives on her show, including representatives of CAIR. The January 2016 lovefest between Kelly and Michael Moore on her Fox show pulled the curtain back. It was jarring. Even the Washington Post called it a televised love-in. 5 When she moved to NBC, Fox added value by subtracting her. This is a war. Now, after the Charlie Hebdo attack, and after the Garland attack, what are we going to do? Are we going to surrender to these monsters? The attack in Garland showed that everything my colleagues and I have been warning about regarding the threat of jihad, and the ways in which it threatens our liberties, is true. Islamic law constitutes a unique threat to freedom of speech, the foundation of a free society that, without it, tyranny can wreak havoc unopposed. Putting up with being offended is essential in a pluralistic society in which people differ on basic truths. If a group will not stand for being offended without resorting to violence, that group will rule unopposed, while everyone else lives in fear. If they cannot be criticized in the United States, we are in effect accepting Islamic law as overriding the First Amendment. This would establish Muslims as a protected class and prevent honest discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence. 180

5 Some say that hate speech should be censored. But what constitutes hate speech is a subjective judgment that is unavoidably influenced by the political perspective of the one doing the judging. Allowing this sort of censorship would mean nothing less than civilizational suicide. Many in the media and academic elite assign no blame to an ideology that calls for death to blasphemers i.e., those who criticize or offend Islam. Instead, they target and blame those who expose this fanaticism. If the cultural elites directed their barbs and attacks at the extremist doctrine of jihad, the world would be a vastly safer place. As I continue to say, you can try to avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. The cartoon-inspired shootings in Garland, Paris, Copenhagen, and elsewhere, targeting defenders of free speech and the raging jihad across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe were the disastrous consequences of avoiding reality. I encourage all Americans to watch the videos of the Garland event and see what Islamic supremacists wish to silence: basic, elemental free speech arguments. But we are unbowed. Even when the venue was in lockdown and hundreds of attendees were ushered down into the auditorium, the crowd was singing the Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America. In the face of fear, they were staunchly and uniquely American. To learn who rules over you, simply find out whom you cannot criticize. I believe if the international media had run the Danish cartoons back in 2005, none of this would have happened. The jihadis wouldn t have been able to kill everyone. But by self-censoring, the media gave the jihadis the power they have today. We must take back our freedom. The FBI and the Garland Jihad Attack In March 2017, 60 Minutes ran a segment on the art exhibit and jihad attack that followed in Garland. 60 Minutes revealed that an undercover FBI agent was in a car directly behind the jihadis, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, when they started shooting. Seconds before security guard Bruce Joiner and police officer Greg Stevens 181

Garland, Texas: ISIS Attacks the Homeland

Ten Garland, Texas: ISIS Attacks the Homeland I n January 2015, I organized a rally against an anti-free speech Islamic conference in Garland, Texas and the leftists were in lockstep, goosestep with the