Don’t Joke About Obama or Islam
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April 14, 2015 by Daniel Greenfield
frontpagemag.com
When the Polk Awards decided to honor the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, one obvious name came to mind. Gary Trudeau.
If there is one man who represents the opposite of what the Charlie cartoonists did, it’s Trudeau. They took risks, Trudeau takes none. They lived knowing that they could be killed at any moment. There is no person on earth who would bother killing Gary Trudeau even if it was Kill Gary Trudeau Day.
Trudeau is that paradoxical creature, the establishment cartoonist, the party satirist, the hack who dares to say exactly what he is expected to say. Imagine NPR in a few black and white sketches. That’s Trudeau’s Doonesbury. Republicans are bad. Liberals are good. And then insert a topical reference.
The Polk Awards were the best forum for Trudeau. George Polk invented heroic wartime exploits that got him a job at CBS. Unlike Brian Williams, Polk did serve, but he was not a fighter pilot, he serviced aircraft. In Greece, his dubious reporting attacking Truman and the Greek government was defended by his lefty colleagues by inventing even more imaginary heroics that he had never claimed for himself.
By the time they were done, Polk had singlehandedly defeated the Japanese.
After Polk was murdered by Greek Communists, American lefties went all out to prove that there had been a conspiracy by the Greek government to silence him. All it took to believe in the Polk Conspiracy was a willingness to disregard the entire history of Communist activities and how casually its armed bands, agents and guerrillas killed people across the entire political spectrum for minor offenses.
But these revelations have not in any way interfered with the Polk Awards. And the Polk Awards decided to make Gary Trudeau the first cartoonist honored with an award. Trudeau would join a seminar on “Dangerous Lines: Cartoonists and Other Subversives” featuring such dangerous subversives as a writer for The Onion and Obama sycophant Jules Feiffer. It was a seminar so dangerously and outrageously subversive it could have been held at Whole Foods.
Trudeau reciprocated by blasting the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists as free speech absolutists and bigots. He claimed that the cartoons of Mohammed did not “challenge authority” and argued that “Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful.”
While the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had challenged the authority of a system of theocracy over a thousand years old, Trudeau’s latest cartoon mocks people stockpiling gasoline.
Trudeau’s rant, published in The Atlantic as “The Abuse of Satire”, claims that Charlie had pandered to the Jews while offending Muslims, described Muslims arrested for supporting the attacks as having exercised their freedom of speech, and contended that by, “attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech”.
Supporting killing cartoonists for drawing Mohammed is free speech. Drawing Mohammed is hate speech.
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