Happy Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!

A number of intrepid souls have contributed to the cause since the last time I covered drawing Mohammed:

• The awesome Bosch Fawstin celebrated Everybody Draw Mohammed Day last year by helping others celebrate Everybody Draw Mohammed Day—for those who wanted to join the cause but didn’t feel up to the task artistically, he offered to draw a Mohammed for each on their behalf; readers took him up on it, and 65 new Mohammed drawings were commissioned and sent out!

Dead-hand Control

Mark Steyn offers even more melancholy reflections than usual, as the soldiers of a thousand-year-old dead man draw the circle ever tighter on free expression in the West.

What Progressivism Looks Like: Terrorists’ Murders Are Your Fault for ‘Insulting’ Them

Truly bizarre.

In light of the Charlie Hebdo shootings last winter and the terrorist attacks this week in Paris and elsewhere, I posted on Facebook, without comment, a link to where people can buy a T-shirt with the drawing of Mohammed from the contest in Texas earlier this year.  It drew several responses from a person who is intelligent and well educated, who works in one of the cultural centers of our country, and who is also a relative, my own flesh and blood.  Nevertheless, because he is also of the left, he said that I shouldn’t be “insulting” Muslims by spreading others’ drawings of Mohammed, and seemed to blame the artists and people like me for the murderers’ actions.  I pushed back—surely he didn’t really mean that?—but he reiterated that it’s our own fault—“those who generalize and insult religious groups serve to fan long-burning flames”.

‘Jihadist Flypaper’

Continuing the discussion of the weekend’s victory for free speech in Texas, Jim Geraghty gets in some good lines.

Is it just me, or have we just invented a form of Islamist/jihadist/ISIS flypaper?

They wore body armor. They carried assault rifles. And one had declared loyalty to ISIS.

Drawing Mohammed: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

(My own contribution to the genre is below, the last item under “The Bad”.)

You’ll have heard about the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January, when Muslim gunmen killed the editor in chief and apparently more than a third of the cartoonists at the magazine, among others.  You may not have heard that there have already been other attacks since then, such as the St. Valentine’s Day shooting at a free-speech event in Denmark (CBS, Mark Steyn, more Steyn), or the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya.

NSA Tries to Shut Down Criticism of Government?

Via Mark Steyn, this is pretty interesting (and so unconstitutional):  Someone creates a shirt making fun of the NSA, and puts it up for sale on Zazzle; it quickly gets yanked.  Salon has the story: “The parody shirt the NSA doesn’t want you to wear”

Two days after the world learned the National Security Agency logs practically every American phone call, the agency had started cracking down on entrepreneurs who made fun of it.

Freedom of the Press under Threat in UK

A deal has been reached by all three major political parties in the United Kingdom to impose severe restrictions on the freedom of the press, apparently including the Internet.  Details are still unclear,* but it seems to include an Orwellian ministry of truth that would have the power to order newspapers to issue “corrections”, letting the government replace what a paper reported with what the government says is true.

Some of the Britons or ex-Britons at National Review Online explain.

• “1771–2013: The Era of the Free Press in Britain”, John O’Sullivan