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”.